The Secret Life of Focus Groups: Robert Merton and the Diffusion of a Research Method

Focus groups became popular in social research in the 1980s. Robert Merton has pointed to the continuities and discontinuities between focus groups and the wartime use of ‘focused interviewing’ he and his colleagues developed at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Using a variety of sources, the paper attempts to chart the ways in which focused interviewing came to be taken up, diffused and modified in marketing research before re-emerging into sociology as the focus group.     

Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault's aesthetics

Abstract

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present.     

Feminism and Beyond: Interview with Carolyn Quadrio

In interview with Kasia Kozlowska, Melbourne‐born psychiatrist Carolyn Quadrio describes the impact of growing up in a Greek migrant family, the significant influences on her choice of profession, and the ways in which she gradually developed a feminist position simultaneously with embracing a systemic perspective on ‘depression’ and other diagnostic categories. Quadrio talks frankly about her challenges to the male‐dominated psychiatric establishment, her struggles to get her critique of it published, her excitement about the family therapy field, and her later disillusionment with it. Her current work is in the area of forensic psychiatry.     

Sustainability standards and certification: looking through the lens of Foucault's dispositif

Over the past few decades, sustainability standards and certification have come to play an important role in the global governance of production and trade. Their purpose is to address the environmental and social problems generated by the globalization of the economy. Yet, as scholars and actors alike have pointed out, framing these problems in terms of technical criteria and procedures might result in rendering some issues invisible and closing potential debate and contestation. Through the empirical analysis of a multi‐stakeholder initiative called the ‘Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil', our aim is to explore how civil society organizations and advocacy networks nevertheless draw new lines of power by using, putting to the test, correcting and constructing formalized knowledge. To shed light on these processes of resistance, we advance an analytic that restores the concept of dispositif coined by Michel Foucault in emphasizing both the disruptive and stabilizing lines that compose a dispositif.     

Curating the Soul: Foucault's concept of hupomnemata and the digital technology of self-care

This paper explores how online actions such as the practice of digital self-writing shape our offline identity. We start with an examination of the concept of hupomnemata – a practice of self-writing in which notes are kept as a ‘material record of things read, heard, or thought’ in the intent of shaping the self [Foucault (1997). Self writing. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics, subjectivity and truth. The essential works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume 1 (pp. 207–222). New York, NY: The New Press p. 209] – before arguing that the practice of digital content curation can be understood as a modern-day variant of the Greco-Roman hupomnemata. Although the work of the digital curator is conducted online, this paper positions contemporary curatorial practices as acts of self-exploration, self-cultivation, and self-care, which nourish offline identity and which ultimately work to shape the offline, corporeal self.     

Intersexuality: On Secret Bodies and Secrecy

The article problematizes the treatment of intersex as a secret within the medical and family systems. Under the biosocial assumption that the “intersexual” body is pathological and requiring immediate surgical and hormonal regulation, intersex individuals are made to undergo a process of transforsexation, that is, the violent production of a normative masculinity or femininity by means of invasive clinical practices. In this process absolute secrecy serves as a central factor for the success of normalization. We argue that not only does “the secret” of intersex bodies become an active factor in the normalization of sex but also paradoxically it is counteracted by the body, which does not “speak” the language of “the secret” and continues to reproduce new forms of intersex combinations in response to ongoing medical intervention. Our analysis is based on case histories told by 6 mothers of intersex children and by 11 intersex adults, stories in which secrecy has been an essential theme in the process of transforsexation imposed by doctors and followed by the parents. Secrecy, even more than the surgery itself, was, in the experience of intersex adults, a great cause of confusion, anger, mistrust, and criticism. Because of secrecy, intersex children are thus deprived of a language to name their experience or interpret the sense of their body.     

From C. P. Ellis to School Integration: The Social Psychology of Conflict Reduction

In this article, the authors review social psychological theories of intergroup conflict reduction. Emphasis is placed on three interrelated social conditions which facilitate conflict reduction: intergroup contact, superordinate goals, and shared identities. Bridging experimental research with real‐world studies of schooling, these concepts are applied to understanding the process of school integration. Social contexts which present conflicting parties with a new shared goal and identity, as well as opportunities to become familiar with others beyond stereotypes and anxious reactions, dramatically increase the likelihood of diffusing conflict.     

Seeking Legitimacy: The Professionalization of Life Coaching

This article uses life coaching as a case study for understanding the attempts of one occupational group to define their work as a profession and themselves as professional people. Life coaches' efforts to legitimate their work are examined within the context of the economic downturn and exemplify an emerging employment trend in the American labor market: college‐educated workers pursuing non‐standard work as independent contractors in personalized service occupations. Using in‐depth interviews with life coaches, I focus on the collective and individual strategies workers use in their attempts to carve out new occupational jurisdictions for their services and bolster their professional status. I explore how gender shapes life coaches' experiences and professionalization tactics; further, I predict that these gendered processes will ultimately influence the trajectory of the life coaching industry more generally. My findings highlight the complexity of current employment relations and offer empirical insights into the study of work, occupations, and gender.