A trembling voice in the desert: Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of the space of the political

Abstract

This essay explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of political space in terms of an ontological ‘being‐with’. It elucidates how Nancy's thinking of community emerges out of the French philosopher's reworking of Heidegger's crucial notion of Mitsein. For Nancy, although Heidegger argues that Dasein is always already also Mitsein, Mitsein is nonetheless also occluded by the priority accorded to Dasein. The consequences for the way in which community or the space of the political is configured are profound since traditional conceptions of the subject of community thus remain unreconstructed. Nancy however does reconstruct community by emphasising that the primal ontological conditions of community are not conceived as the One, the Other or the We, but as the ‘with’, ‘relationality’, and the ‘between’. The question of being (Seinsfrage) thereby becomes the question of being‐with (Mitseinsfrage).     

Diet and Exercise in Parenthood: A Social Control Perspective

Previous work on social control—the direct and indirect regulation of an individual's health behaviors by others—suggests that parent–child relationships promote healthy diet and exercise. Yet parenthood is associated with less healthy diet and exercise patterns. The authors investigated this paradox by examining social control processes in 40 in‐depth interviews with mothers and fathers. They found that parenthood involves social control processes that both promote and compromise healthy behavior, contributing to contradictory perceived effects of parenthood on health behavior. Moreover, the dynamics of social control appear to unfold in different ways for mothers and fathers and depend on the child's gender and life stage, suggesting that gender and age dyads are central to understanding the seemingly contradictory consequences of parenthood at the population level. These articulations of gendered social control processes provide new insight into the consequences of the gendered organization of parenthood for diet and exercise.     

Marital Well‐being and Religiousness as Mediated by Relational Virtue and Equality

This study investigated religiousness and couple well‐being as mediated by relational virtue and equality. Relational spiritual framework theory posits that religiousness is associated with couple well‐being through relational virtues (e.g., forgiveness, commitment, and sacrifice). Theories of relational inequality postulate that religion decreases couple well‐being and indirectly lessens couple well‐being. Data from a 3‐year longitudinal community sample of 354 married couples were used. The authors found that religiousness's relationship to couple well‐being was fully mediated by relational virtue but was not connected to relational inequality. They also found that relational inequality was associated with women's conflict, men's conflict, and marital instability. They did not find that higher religiousness benefits marital outcomes directly. Although these findings do not support the idea that religious activities are directly associated with stronger relationships, the data did show that religiousness can contribute to expressed relational virtue, and relational virtue in turn is associated with marital well‐being.     

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

The use of images is central to Amnesty International's 2004 campaign ‘Stop Violence against Women’. Looking at how Amnesty International uses images to show women's agency reveals a conflation of the terms sex and gender. Despite its best efforts, Amnesty International's goal of empowering women ultimately remains out of reach because it fails to read violence against women in a gendered context. Through interviews and analyses of the images, this article claims that Amnesty International's concept of agency is trapped in a heterosexist, masculinist grammar that perpetuates non-agential articulations of women in human rights discourse. This article offers an alternative reading of gender and agency that contextualizes violence, opening up spaces in human rights discourse to begin to look at what causes individuals to resort to violence and at how violence may be perpetrated because of the presence of particular genders.     

That “Every Man for Himself” Thing: The Rationales of Individualism Among the Urban Poor

Individualism is a frequently referenced but seldom inspected topic within urban poverty literature. Residents of low‐income communities may internalize their social immobility by perceiving status to be determined by choices, behaviors, and psychological or moral shortcomings, but scholars generally depict such individualistic outlooks as only a byproduct of more predominant community dysfunctions. As a result, individualism—an ambiguous and confounding concept at all social strata—can assume an especially disapproving tenor when applied to the urban poor, often connoting qualities of defensiveness, ignorance, and quixotic hope. In this article, I draw from ethnographic fieldwork in Houston's Fifth Ward community to explore individualism's meanings and utility within a context of compromised prospects for positive self‐determination. I explain how defensiveness against vulnerability, violence, and volatile relationships is just one rationale for individualism that is exercised alongside other, still structurally framed rationales (i.e., expressive and meritocratic) on the viability of social mobility.     

Craft as work–life unity: The careers of skilled working‐class men and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization

This article focuses on the enduring significance of craft in the careers of Kent Royal Dockyard craftworkers and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization. The closure of this naval shipbuilding and repair yard together with the subsequent move to post‐industrial employment did not end men's engagement with their craft practices. Instead, this developed into a ‘craft outlook’ defined by a motivation for performing actualizing labour that interwove paid and non‐paid work. Men's careers did not become individualized projects of self as collaborative intergenerational practices gave a long‐term narrative to their careers and lives. Therefore, three contributions are proposed to the literature on working‐class male careers and craft. First, an analytical framework is advanced that empirically distinguishes a ‘craft outlook’ from traditional manual trade employment. Second, a craft outlook reflected ‘whole life careers’ that were constructed from both paid and non‐paid work. Third, the concept of ‘human imprint’ is developed to recognize the generational affirmation produced by the transmission of craft practices.     

Studying the particular, illuminating the general: community studies and community in Wales

This article is inspired by Frankenberg's (1990 ) claim that the best way to understand general social processes is through the study of their manifestation in the details of social life. We look at how studies of community that have been carried out in Wales, particularly Village on the Border and The Family and Social Change (Rosser and Harris, 1965), have accomplished this link between the particular and the general. We then consider the findings of our own research, which is a restudy of Rosser and Harris, showing how they provide a counterbalance to grand theoretical claims about the transformations that are affecting community and family life. We find that although factors such as increasing geographical mobility and women's greater participation in paid work affect people's experiences of community, people continue to place a high value on what they call communities. Such communities are spoken about and defined in different ways but all are based on local social networks of kin, neighbours and friends and/or locally‐based associations. They are also gendered, with women playing a key role at both informal and formal levels of community. We suggest that the apparent resilience of local social relations evident in our research may help to explain the continued cultural and political resonance of community in Wales.     

Accounting for the Performance of Environmentally Significant Behavior: The Symbolic Significance of Recycling

The scientific community has pronounced climate change unequivocal and its consequences disastrous. Yet Americans' behavioral response to the global social problem of environmental degradation has been largely confined to the individual act of recycling. This article examines why Americans are not doing more to address climate change and other environmental issues. Taking a cognitive sociological perspective, I describe how Americans think about environmental issues and pro‐environmental behavior. I draw on Swidler's concept of a “cultural tool kit,” to examine the cultural narratives Americans use to account for the small amount of pro‐environmental behavior they perform. The act of recycling functions as a synecdoche for pro‐environmental behavior in general, allowing individuals to over‐claim the significance of a modest amount of pro‐environmental behavior. I argue that Americans' failure to engage with environmental issues at a collective level is rooted in the individualized culture of American environmentalism.     

‘He is Quirky; He is the World's Greatest Psychologist’: On the Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common

In this article, we challenge the concept of the therapeutic relationship as an operationalisable entity. In contrast to this idea, we introduce Alphonso Lingis’ concept of community, and his distinction between the rational community and the community of those who have nothing in common. This is done through speculative analysis of a transcribed sequence from a research interview with a boy who speaks about his experiences of receiving mental health care. This boy and his family were helped through a network‐oriented, dialogical approach. In the sequence highlighted here, the boy speaks of the significance of a particular mental health practitioner. The boy expresses appreciation for the help he has received, yet it is difficult to translate the boy's utterances into meaningful professional jargon. Although the paper makes use of an actual sequence from a research interview, the argument is not empirical in nature. The purpose of the paper is to elaborate on theory, and to examine some possible consequences for future practice.     

ANDREAS HEINRICH VOIGT AND THE HICKS‐ALLEN REVOLUTION IN CONSUMER THEORY

In 1893, Andreas Heinrich Voigt argued that utility admits only an ordinal characterization. We discuss the apparent impact of Voigt's now forgotten early argument for an ordinal approach to utility on later economists. Edgeworth cited Voigt's ordinal‐cardinal distinction several times in the Economic Journal, bringing both the concept and the terminology into Anglophone economics. In 1927, Rosenstein‐Rodan, too, cited Voigt's argument for ordinal utility. Since Hicks apparently learned the cardinal‐ordinal terminology from Edgeworth, and discussed utility theory and complementarity with Rosenstein‐Rodan, it appears that Voigt's 1893 article is the original source of ordinal utility in economics. (JEL B13, B21)     

‘Talk’ and Hermès

Attention to ‘textuality’ has been used in organizational studies to point to the strong situational quality of organizing, but there has been little detailed empirical or theoretical examination of talk in action. Simply stating that ‘organizing is talk’ is not enough. Starting with Boden's analysis of organizing as ‘talk’, the import of the communication‐based interpretation of organizing is examined. A ‘flat’ or ‘one‐dimensional’ analysis of organization, grounded solely on speech‐based causality, will be rejected. Michel Serres' philosophy of communication provides in the figure of Hermès, needed complex connectionist insight(s) into interaction. And coupled with Levi‐Strauss' concept of the totemic operator, Serres' philosophical insights are used to develop a concept of communicative agency in tune with a complex narrative analysis of organizing.     

Surface Tension: Boundary Negotiations around Self,Society, and Nature in a Community Debate over Wildlife

This study draws on extensions of a Meadian framework to explore the possibility of nature as a “generalized other” that is experienced through a dialogical eco‐self. The author revisits Mead's work, tracing an emerging literature on the eco‐self, and investigates constructions of human–nature boundaries using interviews from a community reacting to the human destruction of a cattle egret nesting colony. She introduces the concept of “surface tension” to capture the fluid, negotiated, and often contradictory quality of narratives about nature and the self. The findings highlight the eco‐self as an emergent and ongoing accomplishment that is not reducible to any one formulation.     

Mother Died Today or Maybe Yesterday: Reflections of L'etranger on Team‐Based Forms of Work Organization

One of the most enduring images of late twentieth‐century popular culture was the individualist and iconoclastic portrayal of the ‘grumpy old man’ Victor Meldrew in the BBC television series One Foot in the Grave. Richard Wilson's portrayal of the recently retired security worker is the antithesis of everything that contemporary organizations require from the idealized vision of employee as ‘team‐player’. As one who revels in the way that the epitaph ‘Victor’ is thrown at me at regular intervals both by my partner and children, at times when I think I am behaving normally, I thought it would be interesting for me to reflect, in public, on my relationship to contemporary workplace relations. It is my contention that Meldrew's characterization is not wholly based around the age dimension but is equally based upon his portrayal as an individual ill at ease with the mores of gregariousness. The essay therefore is a self‐reflective piece in which the author places himself in a particular milieu—that of L'etranger and uses this ‘placing’ in order to discuss the relationship between what he defines as ‘the outsider’ and the issue of age discrimination in contemporary blue‐collar environments. It is suggested that whilst the outsider or L'etranger is accepted under certain conditions within the managerial labour process this same level of organizational tolerance is not afforded to older workers within blue‐collar areas. It moves from a reflective, even autodidactic exploration of the relationship between the author and cultural articulations of L'etranger and uses this to inform an analysis of the acceptance of L'etranger within some aspects of the managerial labour within team based manufacturing units. In exploring these issues the essay then attempts to develop a third narrative in terms of now L'etranger, approaching the age of retirement fits in to the new academic labour process.     

What is Trust? A Multidisciplinary Review,Critique, and Synthesis

Despite decades of interdisciplinary research on trust, the literature remains fragmented and balkanized with little consensus regarding its origins. This review documents how this came to be and attempts to offer a solution. Specifically, it evaluates issues of conceptualization found in the trust literature. I recommend that we move away from varieties of trust – multidimensional conceptualizations of trust – and toward a single trust concept built around four essential properties: actor A's beliefs, actor B's trustworthiness, the matter(s) at hand, and unknown outcomes. I finish the article by proposing a synthetic structural‐cognitive theoretical framework for investigating the causes and consequences of trust in everyday life.     

‘Beyond the Scope of the Possible’: Art,Photography and Organisational Abjection

This paper explores the impacts Wal‐Mart's operations have on community culture. However, through the application of the psychodynamics of mirroring and a thorough version of dialectical analysis, we can see that community culture turns on itself to mirror what Wal‐Mart wants that culture to be. As such, community culture has little or no power or even desire to counter Wal‐Mart's negative affects and the result is an unfinished dialectic. The unfinished dialectic parallels the rudimentary concept of dialectics as being only thesis, anti‐thesis and synthesis, where synthesis is assumed to be, generally, a positive outcome, for everyone involved. As the investigation into Wal‐Mart continues, we see that there are negative outcomes on community culture as well as on Wal‐Mart leadership that require negation but are not negated. With that which fulfils our desires, we allow ourselves to become enraptured by only positive images or the perceived ‘good’ of something or someone when it is too difficult to unravel ambivalence and ambiguity of the mutual causality of opposites inherent in relationships.     

Piet Draghoender's Lament

The main purpose of the paper is to provide a context for “Piet Draghoender's Lament, “a most remarkable piece of oral literature composed spontaneously by a 76‐year‐old illiterate Coloured farmer facing eviction from his birthplace. His feelings and attitudes are representative of the entire Kat River community.

The paper explains the claim of the Draghoenders to their land in terms of the concept of “bloedgrond”: the blood which they inherited and the blood which they spilled to “free” the ground and to make it their own. It also analyses the agonised conflict in Draghoender's mind between his innate resentment and his religious conviction that it is his duty to submit to the will of God. The paper concludes by recounting the subsequent history of the Draghoender family, which illustrates the way in which their religious beliefs undermined their ability to fight for their rights.     

Community‐oriented Social Work in Cuba: Government Response to Emerging Social Problems

Cuba developed a unique community‐oriented social work approach in the 1990s that transformed social work education and practice. This paper describes that approach and why it emerged when it did. A review of the literature on social change in Cuba in the 1990s, and 31 open‐ended interviews conducted in Havana, Cuba, showed that social work changed in response to economic crisis, emerging social problems and the need for social workers for community practice. Social workers' participation in neighborhood development projects and Cuba's post‐Revolutionary communal ethos also shaped a community‐oriented social work approach in Cuba. This approach contrasts with an individually oriented model in the US and in Britain. Social workers in Cuba and in these countries can learn from one another, despite the differences that exist among them.     

‘Ch'us mon propre Bescherelle’: Challenges from the Hip‐Hop nation to the Quebec nation1

We examine the uses of and attitudes towards language of members of the Montreal Hip‐Hop community in relation to Quebec language‐in‐education policies. These policies, implemented in the 1970s, have ensured that French has become the common public language of an ethnically diverse young adult population in Montreal. We argue, using Blommaert's (2005) model of orders of indexicality, that the dominant language hierarchy orders established by government policy have been both flattened and reordered by members of the Montreal Hip‐Hop community, whose multilingual lyrics insist: (1) that while French is the lingua franca, it is a much more inclusive category which includes ‘Bad French,’ regional and class dialects, and European French; and (2) that all languages spoken by community members are valuable as linguistic resources for creativity and communication with multiple audiences. We draw from a database which includes interviews with and lyrics from rappers of Haitian, Latin‐American, African‐American and Québécois origin.     

Travelling theory in China: contextualization,compromise and combination

In this article we explore the dissemination of human rights ideas in China through an ethnographic study of three women's organizations: the government's ‘letters and complaints’ department, the governmental NGO affiliated with it, and a legal aid centre; all are located in Beijing. We argue that there are two paths in China for the transmission of international human rights ideas – a government one and a non‐government one. The government path, featured as contextual and compromising, is rooted in socialist and collective values, and the governmental organizations we studied function squarely within the domestic legal framework and the concept of ‘women's rights and interests’. The non‐governmental path, by contrast, characterized by vernacularization, namely a combination of international ideas with local practice to promote legal reform in China, is the result of economic development and interactions with the international community. Both paths interact within their different spheres to further the development of women's rights.