The Contested State vs. Contentious Workers: The Symbolic Labor Politics in Transitional China

How does the Chinese state maintain its legitimacy and manage labor conflicts during its transition to market economy? Through detailed analysis of a 10-year struggle by a group of state workers to defend their pensions by active engagement with state agents, this article attempts to explore the circular feature of the state and how this circular state functions to absorb the labor contentions. This state is composed of three intersecting circles—a circle between different petition offices, a circle between petition offices and courts, and a circle between the local and the center. On the one hand, the circulation of the workers’ case in this circular bureaucratic field elongates the struggles of the workers and prevents the radicalization of their resistance; on the other hand, this circle promotes the circulation and inculcation of statist capitals among workers. This process realizes both the discursive construction of the new state and the symbolic domination of the resisting workers.     

A Eulogy to the Past:Symbolic Meanings of Faulkner's Rose

Written relatively early in Faulkner's writing career, A Rose for Emily recounts a North-South, cross-class love story which concludes surprisingly with a murder mystery when the townspeople in the closing paragraphs find Homer Barron's corpse inextricable from Emily's to-be bridal bed. This paper unscrambles the symbolic meanings of the rose in this novel, trying to make readers understand more about Emily and the themes and styles of Faulkner's works.     

The Inherently Contested Nature of Nongovernmental Accountability: The Case of HAP International

While the principled case for humanitarian accountability is relatively straightforward, the practice is demonstrably more complicated, necessitating constant negotiation among stakeholders. However, despite the wave of research into nongovernmental accountability, few empirical studies have grappled with the phenomenon’s inherently contested nature. This paper foregrounds tensions arising in the elaboration of nonprofit accountability. Its approach is informed by critical constructivist theory, an international relations approach attuned to social power, identity and exclusion, and conceptual contestation; its conclusions are supported by interview data with key stakeholders. Focusing on the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) International, it finds that initial consensus on the desirability of beneficiary (downward) accountability quickly gave way to principled disagreements and operational difficulties. Specifically, the initiation stage of HAP was marked by two conflicts—a debate about enforcement and a turf war over control—culminating in rebranding and relocation. The implementation stage was characterized by tensions over certification and intra-organizational struggles over leadership. The contemporary practice of accountability is shown to be a contingent and contested social process, with humanitarian identity and practice ultimately at stake.

     

Redefining the Refuge: Symbolic Interactionism and the Emergent Meanings of Environmentally Variable Spaces

I utilize ethnographic data to illustrate how the meanings of a National Wildlife Refuge were being rearticulated following a shift in Canada goose migrations that undermined previously established meanings of the space. Beyond highlighting the ability of symbolic interactionism to incorporate a range of interdisciplinary works on space, I illustrate how the Meadian approach to temporality can be useful for understanding how the meanings of spaces are rearticulated in response to variable socio‐environmental processes like goose migrations or climate change. Through this analysis, I hope to highlight the usefulness of symbolic interactionism for future research on space generally and adaptations to socio‐environmental variabilities specifically.     

Framing the Fat Body: Contested Meanings between Government,Activists, and Industry*

Sociologists have long recognized that social problems do not derive solely from objective conditions but from a process of collective definition. At the core of some social issues are framing competitions, struggles over the production of ideas and meanings. This article examines competing cultural meanings about the fat body. Through frame analysis of organizational materials, I map the contested field of obesity and document three cultural frames—medical frame, social justice frame, and market choice frame—as represented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), and the food industry group the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), respectively. Using the “framing matrix,” I explore each frame's key signature elements and discuss its social and cultural significance. Notably, each frame leads to different outcomes for social equality and how society thinks about fat bodies, health, and public policy.     

Symbolic Justice: The Status Politics of the American Probation Movement

Abstract

This paper addresses in substantive terms an emerging debate between Marxian and Weberian perspectives on crime and law. It is argued that the cooptive character of the American probation movement and its impact on juvenile and criminal law is an anomaly for orthodox Marxian theory and its preoccupation with coercive strategies of crime control. Revisionist Marxian perspectives similarly fail to account for the growth of this movement. An alternative Weberian approach is then articulated. It is found that probation legislation evolved at a federal level in juxtaposition to American temperance legislation, drawing its base of support from status groups reluctant to support the latter social movement, as well as from the leadership and rank and file organization of a voluntary association, the National Probation Association. The attention of a Weberian approach to such factors of organization and status helps to correct a one-sidedness in the Marxian class analysis of crime and law.     

The Global Development Project Contested: The Local Politics of the PRSP Process in Malawi

Development, in an age of globalizations, has indeed become a global project. However, this project remains contested and contestable. While much attention has been given to this contestation at a macro-policy level, the dynamics of such contestations on the ground remain less studied. Noting that development projects, policies and programs are themselves products of power relations and social struggles, this paper focuses on the dynamics of these relations and struggles in relation to the dissemination of the global development project in Malawi. Drawing from the experiences and fractious journey from 2000 to 2006 of the broad-based civil society network involved in Malawi's ongoing PRSP process, the paper shows how local actors draw creatively on globalized discourses of participation and representation to contest and confound the objectives of the elites, thereby complicating the channels through which the global development project is promulgated.

El desarrollo en la era de la globalización, se ha convertido en un proyecto global. Sin embargo, este proyecto sigue siendo controvertido y cuestionable. Mientras que se le ha dado mucha importancia a esta controversia a nivel macro-político, la dinámica de estos cuestionamientos es menos estudiada a nivel local. Dado que los proyectos, programas y políticas de desarrollo son a su vez el producto de las relaciones de poder y de las luchas sociales, este artículo se centra en la dinámica de estas relaciones y de estas luchas en la diseminación del proyecto global de desarrollo en Malawi. Con base en la experiencia y las dificultades que surgieron entre el 2000 al 2006, entre el proceso PRSP de Malawi y la amplia red de la sociedad civil involucrada en él, el artículo demuestra cómo, de manera creativa, los actores locales, basándose en el discurso globalizado de la participación y representación, protestan y confunden los objetivos de las élites, complicando los canales a través de los cuales se divulga el proyecto de desarrollo global.

在全球化时代,发展问题已然成为一个全球性项目。然而,对这一项目仍然存有争议。不过争议主要集中在宏观政策层面上,对争议在草根层面上的动力学研究不足。本文注意到发展项目、政策和方案本身是权力关系和社会斗争的产物,着重研究涉及马拉维全球发展项目传播过程中这些关系和斗争之间的动态关系。从基础广泛的市民社会网络从2000年到2006年的经验和反抗历程来看（该网络参与了马拉维正在进行的减贫战略文件进程）,本文表明了当地行为者是如何创造性地利用参与权和代表权等全球性话语,来竞争和挫败精英的目标,从而使得全球发展项目的传播路径复杂化。     

Symbolic Economies: Money,Neoliberal Law and National Politics in Argentina

In this article, I examine Argentina's neoliberal reforms throughout the 1990s from a Marxist theoretical perspective, analysing how money, monetary policy and law constitute a fundamental mode of ideological regulation in neoliberal capitalism. Situating this analysis in the context of the capitalist crisis of the mid-1970s, the article discusses the politics of effacement that in Argentina's case paved the way for the use of monetary policy as a form of social control intended to embed the nation-state into global capitalism. Examining economic legislation, macro-economic policies, political ideologies, consumer discourses and pension privatization, I analyse how the neoliberal monetary regime ideologically underpinned a whole state imaginary based on exchange rate parity with the US dollar. Further, I investigate the ideological function of money in symbolically reordering the relationships of workers and citizens to the state, capital and culture. The article concludes with an exploration of the political significance of the monetary collapse of the Argentine neoliberal reform in 2001–2002, comparing Argentina's crisis of hegemony with that of other states within global capitalism.     

Uneasy Settlements: Reparation Politics and the Meanings of Money in the Israeli Withdrawal from Gaza

Negotiations about reparations tend to take the language of interests and to deal primarily with monetary compensation for disadvantaged groups. In such proceedings, aggrieved claimants are likely to make a variety of claims about the use of money to represent their experience, ranging from demands for increased compensation to rejections of the entire process altogether. This article draws attention to the communicative functions of money in the reparation process. It claims that actors may grudgingly agree to attach a monetary value to what they hold sacred, but simultaneously strive to preserve their sense of self‐worth and to elicit identification by raising moral critiques about the use of fiscal logic. To exemplify, the article focuses on the 2005 removal of Jewish‐Israeli settlers from Israeli‐occupied territories. It shows that settlers indeed demanded to be compensated fiscally for their lost property. At the same time, it shows that they raised objections to the use of fiscal logic in representing their experience and offered alternate logics of evaluation. The settlers resisted shame and devaluation through such competing logics, demanding that the state reaffirm a positive and embracing relationship with them despite its decision to evict them.     

From Mastery to Accountability: Cultural Humility as an Alternative to Cultural Competence

Cultural competency has been a long held ideal for social work educators and practitioners. However, definitions and approaches to cultural competency vary widely depending on worldview, discipline, and practice context. Within social work and beyond, cultural competency has been challenged for its failure to account for the structural forces that shape individuals' experiences and opportunities. In contrast, the concept ofcultural humility takes into account the fluidity of culture and challenges both individuals and institutions to address inequalities. This article takes a critical look at cultural competence as a concept, examining its explicit and implicit assumptions, and the impact these assumptions have on practitioners. It suggests that cultural humility may offer social work an alternative framework as it acknowledges power differentials between provider and client and challenges institutional-level barriers. The authors advocate a move from a focus on mastery in understanding ‘others’ to a framework that requires personal accountability in challenging institutional barriers that impact marginalized communities. Cultural humility, while a promising concept, has not been fully explored in social work. Therefore, the authors present a conceptual model of cultural competency along with strategic questions for providers and organizations to integrate into social work practice and education.     

Juridical Framings of Immigrants in the United States and France: Courts,Social Movements,and Symbolic Politics

This study reexamines the engagement of U.S. and French courts with immigration politics, aiming to provide a fuller accounting of how law and immigration politics shape one another. Jurisprudential principles are placed in national and historical context, elucidating the role of rights‐oriented legal networks in formulating these arguments during the 1970s and early 1980s. The analysis traces how these judicial constructions of immigrants subsequently contributed to catalyzing a transformation of immigration politics in both countries. Immigrant rights jurisprudence is shown to be produced by, as well as productive of, broader political values, agendas, and identities.     

Americans’ Approval of the 2010 Affordable Care Act: Self‐interest and Symbolic Politics*

Public opinion data show substantial variation in attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Utilizing a 2013 Gallup survey of U.S. adults, we examine the effects of self‐interest and symbolic politics measures on several dimensions of ACA approval. Supporting symbolic politics, we find liberal political ideology, democratic party affiliation, and positive evaluations of President Obama are consistently associated with greater approval of the ACA generally, as well as the belief that the ACA will improve the healthcare situation of the United States and one's family specifically. In contrast, self‐interest variables produce less consistent results. Self‐reported familiarity with the law and being uninsured due to one's employer not offering health insurance are associated with greater belief the ACA will improve the healthcare situation of one's family specifically, but not the U.S. healthcare situation generally. Together these findings suggest that political values and symbols—in particular perceptions of President Obama—may be more important in shaping attitudes toward the ACA than self‐interest variables, especially in contexts assessing more generalized support for the legislation.     

Politics gone cancerous: why the Marikana massacre should be prosecuted as an international crime

What makes the Marikana massacre particularly chilling and poignant is the fact that the use of lethal force on a mass scale was sanctioned by South Africa’s democratically elected government. It also makes the massacre relevant to international law. It will be established in this article that the killing of 34 striking miners by the South African police is a crime that transcends the limits and boundaries of domestic justice. This article will explore an approach to the legal aftermath of Marikana that has not yet received academic attention: the question of whether the Marikana massacre should be prosecuted as an international crime. The article will further consider the factors that will have to be taken into account in classifying the massacre as an international crime. It will be argued that even though instinctively a crime of this scale might seem to reach the gravity of an international crime, the application of the strict legal requirements for international crimes, the policy requirement in the definition of a crime against humanity, the doctrine of complementarity as well as the gravity threshold applied by the International Criminal Court render it complicated but not unlikely that the massacre will be considered an international crime in the sense of meeting the jurisdictional requirements set out for such crimes.     

Reforming Poor Women: The Cultural Politics and Practices of Welfare Reform

This article employs participant observation and interviewing at a community-based job readiness program operating under welfare reform to explore how attempts at cultural retraining (that is, bringing presumably deviant behavior in line with dominant cultural norms) are delivered, received, and interpreted by welfare-reliant women. This study finds that poor women—the targets of these reforms—largely resist cultural retraining, but, ironically, assert its usefulness for welfare-reliant women generally. These ethnographic data support and expand upon previous interview and focus group studies that have encountered the same attribution paradox among welfare-reliant women.     

两党政治下美国教育政策对青少年发展的影响——以新世纪以来教育改革政策为例

教育政策的主要目标是实现教育对个体和社会发展的促进功能.受某些政治因素影响,教育与人和社会的发展关系可能失调或出现局部的负向功能.由于美国由两党轮番执政,两党在政治理念上具有左右摇摆的特点,造成政府的教育政策具有极大的不稳定性和不连续性,从而导致教育的负向功能相当明显,使教育在特定政治环境下未能促进青少年的个体化发展和...     

世界城市行政体制改革:经验比较与模式选择

纽约、伦敦、东京和巴黎等世界城市在行政管理体制的模式选择各具特色,通过比较发现,体现出不同的政治制度、区域特色、历史文化等差异性,也展现出许多共同的演化规律和改革特征。总结世界城市行政管理体制改革经验,对我国大城市的主要政策启示在于,构建坚持党委领导下的市区两级政府、三级管理的中国模式,将街道、乡镇职能下放社区,加强政府职能整合和社会群众监督,加强社会组织培育,促进公共服务社会化、多元化、均等化供给。