GENDERED SPECTRE

The focus of this essay is gendered collective memory of the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, at the time of Independence from British rule. The essay addresses the question of whether there are similarities between trauma studies that developed within a Western Freudian psychoanalytic framework and the anti-colonial theory practiced by decolonizing nations. Taking two women's texts, the essay examines how gender manifests itself within the framework of trauma and how it is played out in collective memory of partition. The texts chosen raise interesting questions about gender, trauma and the nation and provide an alternative non-Western framework through which the trauma of partition can be read. The essay points to how the category of memory and its meanings vary in their national, cultural and historical specificity.     

LINGERING NUANCES: GENDERED CAREER MOTIVATIONS AND ASPIRATIONS OF FIRST-YEAR LAW STUDENTS

This study examined students' career motivations and aspirations at the beginning of their legal education and after one semester in law school. Interviews with 29 law students within the first few weeks of their first semester revealed interesting differences in women's and men's long-term, but not short-term, career ambitions: notably women had lower expectations for their career trajectories than did men. Work and family concerns also played a role in women's perception of possible career paths and were defined by both women and men as potential barriers to their careers. Follow-up interviews with the same students after their first semester in law school also exposed the different experiences of the law students based mostly on their gender and grades. After one semester of law school and after first-year grades were received, the gendered reactions to their grades provided insight into women's and men's perceptions of viable career options.     

THE URBAN CONTEXT OF HISTORICAL ACTIVISM:

This article examines the contextual determinants of two types of NAACP activism between 1930 and 1939. They are the justice-oriented outreach of insurgency (e.g., a civil rights rally), and chapter-building activities (e.g., electing committee chairpersons). Activism is analyzed using a more diverse set of factors than previous research on the sociopolitical context of social movements. Specifically, I examine historical urbanization and prior racial institutional development in 136 urban counties of the United States, about 95% of the 1930 African American urban system. WLS regression is used to provide a strong statistical basis for understanding the structural power and liberation context of these two distinct types of activism during the uniquely constrained Depression Era. Both insurgency and chapter-building activities increased due to the expanding non-southern location of African Americans and the effects of WWI-era declines in the population of foreign-born hites. They declined as a result of extreme racial-occupational segregation in the local area and being distant from a predominantly African American county. The factors shaping the two types of activism were not equal, in part due to both shared and non-shared determinants. A particularly instructive finding was that wage growth served as a lever of social control, being negatively related to insurgency. Viewed together, the findings clearly point to the joint influence of economic and noneconomic factors in shaping NAACP activism during the 1930s, and enhance our understanding of the broader determinants of Africans activism generally.     

HARD DRUGS IN A SOFT CONTEXT:

This paper presents ethnographic data on the social world of a group of four college-student crack-cocaine users. A comparative theory of modes of crack using is developed, grounded in strategic comparisons among these data and previously published accounts of the lives of impoverished "street" users. Two social-organizational conditions shielded the campus users from the kinds of crack-related trouble observed in other settings: the security of their social, economic, and physical environment and the boundedness of the spheres of their social lives. Additionally, two related ways of understanding crack served to limit trouble: orienting to crack as a social object to be used only in leisure rituals and the understanding that crack should not impinge on spheres of life outside the using group.     

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF RELIGIOUS INTEGRATION AND SUICIDE:

Recent research suggests that Durkheimian ideas on the impact of religious affiliation on suicide need to be updated and tailored to the modern cultural landscape of the United States. Following up on the importance of how historical context has shifted the integrative power of denominational networks, this article pursues the potential utility of a networks, perspective by suggesting that a significant contextual element has been neglected to date: Geographical context, both regional and rural-urban dimensions, also delimits the differential ability of religions to form a "community' of social support capable of integrating individuals. If the network approach provides a useful direction, the effects of religious affiliation across geographical areas should vary in a manner consistent with notions of how social structural opportunity and tradition (of lack thereof) affect religious network strength. Analyses of detailed suicide, religion, and sociodemographic data by region and population density in U.S. county groups do, in fact, indicate that for many major religious groups the effects of religious affiliation on suicide vary across geographical areas, consistent with network theory. For example, while Judaism's protective effect is small overall, it is large in the Northeast and reversed in the South. The protective strength also is reversed for Catholicism in the South and many Evangelical Protestant groups in the Northeast. Overall, the results suggest that region exerts a greater impact on religious affiliation effects than does population density, though the latter does impact on Catholic and Jewish effects.     

ATTENDING TO THE CONTEXT OF FAMILY TREATMENT: PITFALLS AND PROSPECTS

This paper argues that family therapy is failing to attend to the contexts in which family mental health services are provided and, therefore, is losing touch with the realities of family services in communities. We present a model for describing the institutional contexts of family mental health treatment in North America, and explore how these contexts influence family treatment. The model proposes that family mental health care can be categorized into three levels, analogous to the levels of the health care delivery system: (a) primary, (b) secondary, and (c) tertiary care. These levels represent systematically different contexts for family treatment; each has unique advantages and limitations. Translating treatment methods across levels can be hazardous because of differences in contexts. We argue that delineating the contextual levels of family mental health care can encourage more fruitful and respectful collaboration among the diverse professional groups working with families.     

CONSTITUENT INTEREST VS. LEGISLATOR IDEOLOGY: THE ROLE OF POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY COST

This paper applies the economic model of legislative voting to the automobile industry domestic content vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982. We consider constituent interests for and against the Ml, and compare the predictive powers of alternative indicators of ideological preferences.
We also examine the role of political opportunity cost and find that lame ducks were significantly less likely to vote for the bill than were returnees to Congress. Given the political advantages of voting for the bill, this is consistent with the view that legislators were influenced by the case for freer trade.     

IS THERE RECIPROCITY IN A RECIPROCAL‐EXCHANGE ECONOMY? EVIDENCE OF GENDERED NORMS FROM A SLUM IN NAIROBI,KENYA

Norms of reciprocity help enforce cooperative agreements in bilateral sequential exchange. We examine the norms that apply in a reciprocal-exchange economy. In our one-shot investment game in a Nairobi slum, people adhered to the norm of "balanced reciprocity," which obligates quid-pro-quo returns for any level of trust. The norm is gendered, with people more likely to comply when confronted with women rather than men, and differs from "conditional reciprocity," prevalent in developed countries, according to which greater trust is rewarded with proportionally larger returns. Balanced reciprocity produces less trust and trustworthiness and smaller gains from trade than conditional reciprocity. ( JEL C72, C91)     

FROM WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY TO GENDERED TECHNOSCIENCE

This paper situates current discussions of women's position in ICTs in the wider context of feminist debates on gender and technology. While a common trend among early feminist theorists was a profound pessimism about the inherent masculinity of technology, this was replaced during the 1990s by an unwarranted optimism about the liberating potential of technoscience for women. This article gives an account of both technophobia and technophilia, arguing that recent approaches drawing on the social studies of technology provide a more subtle analysis. Avoiding both technological determinism and gender essentialism, technofeminist approaches emphasize that the gender-technology relationship is fluid and flexible, and that feminist politics and not technology per se is the key to gender equality.     

THE INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT OF OBJECT RELATIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR FAMILY THERAPY*

Psychodynamic theory and family systems theories have come to represent competing orientations in the understanding of human behavior. This paper extends the quest for an integration of these perspectives. This is done by mapping ideas from one orientation onto constructs from the other. Case examples illustrate the ideas and demonstrate how inner dynamics and interactional behavior dovetail to create systemic and personal crises. Clinical implications highlight the need (a) for psychodynamic therapists to recognize the contextual forces that activate personality structures and (b) for systems therapists to recognize the idiosyncratic meanings of interactional behaviors.     

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE IN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: QUESTIONS OF CONTEXT IN FAMILY THERAPY

Family therapy's neglect of social context as a factor in its continuing distortion of women's issues has led feminist critics to wonder if systems-based psychotherapy truly serves women. Rather than heralding the demise of family therapy, however, the feminist critique is here taken to open up concerns central to the epistemological discussion underway in the field. At first, these have to do with the functions of "punctuation,""boundary" and "closure" in systemic epistemology. Later, the central question becomes that of the place given to context in systems epistemology generally, as well as family therapy in particular. Several implications of a more lively interest in context for family therapy's work are explored. These are discussed with respect to women's issues, clinical epistemology, and the challenge to raise novel questions in family therapy.     

THE EFFECT OF POST-HIGH SCHOOL SOCIAL CONTEXT ON SELF-ESTEEM

This study examines the effect of post-high school social context on self-concept development by assessing changes in positive self-esteem (i.e., self-confidence) in a national longitudinal sample of males who entered the full-time labor force, the active federal military, or college after high school. The data are from Bachman's Youth in Transition study of 2,213 American high school students in five data waves between 1966 and 1974. Estimation of a LISREL structural equation model shows that of the three contexts, the military has the most significant (negative) net impact on self-concept, followed by work (slightly negative), and college (no impact). It is argued that the observed negative effect of the military context (and possibly the work context) is rooted in the larger sociohistorical processes impinging on the individual, and on the workers' and servicemen's low organizational positions. College's lack of effect appears to be due to the students' relatively high prior self-esteem and the possibility that college impacts social and political values more than self-worth. The number of months in a context positively relates to later self-esteem. It is argued that duration may work through acclimation to the role demands of one's context and to an increase in feelings of mastery and control.     

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF RACE DIFFERENTIALS IN JUVENILE JUSTICE DISPOSITIONS

Proponents of traditional conflict theory have argued that minority races receive harsher justice system dispositions because they lack the power and resources to ensure equal treatment. Hawkins' (1987) proposed revision of this model predicts minoritv races will receive harsher dispositions in social contexts in which their power threatens the dominant group's hegemony.
This study uses juvenile justice processing data from the 32 Florida SMA counties to examine these competing models. The effects of three measures of blacks' power are considered—the relative size of black and white population, the proportion of blacks who are poor, and the average black/white income gap—on differential treatment of black and white juveniles at three court processing stages. A higher proportion of whites in the population is associated with harsher dispositions for black youths. This result is consistent with traditional conflict theory. The other two measures have no differential racial effect on disposition severity.     

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE: The Case of the Retail Food Industry

Technological innovations result not just from advances in science, but also social system reorganization. Reorganization is problematic, as various organizations and constituents pursue their interests and causes. Expanding on previous work in the economics and sociology of innovation, three cases from the retail food industry (frozen meat, boxed beef, and scanners) illustrate the process described in a politicized-context model of innovation. Market context, political contingencies, and established social relations all influence innovations. Thus, including these factors in the politicized-context model provides better understanding of the particular paths of innovation.     

CONTEXT EFFECTS FOR CENSUS MEASURES OF RACE AND HISPANIC ORIGIN

This paper reports on the results of a split-ballot experimentconducted in 1987 to test alternative versions of the decennialcensus long form. Two forms were randomly assigned and self-administeredin group sessions involving a total of 515 respondents. Theorder of race and Hispanic origin items was experimentally manipulated.The standard long form asks race, then Hispanic origin. Theexperimental form reversed the order of the items in order toreduce perceived redundancy, and to create a more restrictedframe of reference for the race item. The objectives of thecontext manipulation were (1) to reduce item nonresponse forthe Hispanic origin item, and (2) to reduce reporting of "Otherrace" by Hispanics in the race item. Objective (1) was met.Objective (2) was met for Hispanics born in a U.S. state, butnot for immigrants. The results are interpreted as reflectinga process of acculturation that affects how Hispanic respondentsapply U.S. racial categories "white" and "black" in the census.     

THE DIFFERENTIAL EFFECT OF LABOR MARKET CONTEXT ON MARGINAL EMPLOYMENT OUTCOMES

Transformation of the labor market creates a complex and dynamic environment where jobs and skills are exchanged. Studies suggest that contemporary industrial shifts provided less opportunity than in the past, and that technological change led to a complicated melange of employment outcomes. Many of the new jobs are characterized by a series of negative qualities related to income and hours. Accordingly, this analysis concentrates on inadequate employment through low-wage work and involuntary part-time work. I examine the effect of contextual factors, specifically area levels of occupational sex-segregation and the size of the service sector industry, on men and women's marginal employment outcomes. Several findings stand out. First, women post higher chances of working for low-wages than their male counterparts. However, employment in the expanding service sector does reduce men and women's chances of experiencing part-time work. Second, the protection afforded by individual level, human capital qualities remains relatively constant for women across metro areas, but labor market context significantly affects women's odds of employment marginalization. Context is not as salient for men, but the value of their personal attributes vary across labor markets. Finally, women working in areas with higher levels of occupational sex-segregation were relatively worse off than those in areas with more integration. Industrial restructuring clearly contributed to recent shifts in U.S. employment and inequality. Studies suggest that contemporary industrial shifts have provided less opportunity than in the past, greater inequality between rich and poor, and a complicated melange of inadequate employment outcomes (Colclough and Tolbert 1992; Farley 1996; Harrison and Bluestone 1988; Morris, Bernhardt, and Handcock 1994; Sassen 1994). Deindustrialization, as it is sometimes called, offers opportunity for highly-educated, skilled, or technologically-innovative men and women. However, lower skilled workers or those with less education may face relatively good job markets filled with positions that are low quality in terms of wages, hours, or benefits. This bifurcation of work is credited with not only reducing the sex-wage gap, but also increasing inequality within sex groups (Bernhardt, Morris, and Handcock 1995). By employing a new structuralist approach and focusing on the area opportunity structure, along with the traditional human capital framework, I link both the local labor market context and individual qualities that affect employment outcomes (Browne 1997; Cotter et al. 1997; McCall 2000). In this article, I examine the effect of contextual factors, specifically the area industrial composition and the openness of the labor market, on men and women's marginal employment outcomes during the early 1990s.