Reflexivity in the Research Process: Psychoanalytic Observations

This paper highlights what psychoanalysis can add to discussions of reflexivity, by specifically describing how reflexivity is conceptualized and fostered on psychoanalytic observation methods courses at the Tavistock Clinic, London. It is demonstrated that this psychological form of reflexivity is relevant to empirical and conceptual work and shown that it shares interesting parallels with debates about reflexivity in social research methods, while also being able to contribute to discussions of what constitutes reflexivity and what kinds of methods course might facilitate it. Reflexivity is often discussed in relation to a researcher’s empirical work, but this paper argues that reflexivity is equally needed in relation to the academic context in which most research and learning takes place. This paper demonstrates how psychoanalytic approaches to learning stimulate a reflexive relation to empirical and conceptual work and it provides examples of reflexivity from a two‐year infant observation and a research project on romantic love (involving conceptual and biographical research).     

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 Ossification of American Labor Law and the Decline of Self-governance in the Workplace

This article argues that the ineffectuality of American labor law and the shrinking scope of collective representation and collective bargaining are partly traceable to the law’s “ossification”—to its having been essentially sealed off for several decades from democratic revision and renewal and from local experimentation and innovation. The elements of this process of ossification, once assembled, make up an imposing set of barriers to innovation. The basic law has been cut off from legislative revision at the national level by Congress; from “market”-driven competition by employers; from the entrepreneurial and creative energies of private litigation; from variation at the state or local level by representative or judicial bodies; from changing constitutional doctrine; and from emerging transnational legal norms. Moreover, the National Labor Relations Board—the designated institutional vehicle for adjusting the labor laws to modern conditions—is increasingly hemmed in by the age of the text and the large body of judicial interpretations that has grown up over the years. The resulting statutory scheme is drastically out of date and out of sync with the needs of 21st century workers and labor markets.

National Symbols and National Identity: Currency and Constructing Cosmopolitans in Tunisia

This article examines the imagery on Tunisian banknotes and its role in constructing a state-sponsored vision of Tunisian national identity. In addition to analyzing the currency itself, the article embeds the symbols used on the money in a social and historical context by looking at other public uses of the historical figures pictured and drawing on ethnographic work conducted in Tunisia. The article suggests that the banknotes must be seen as part of a larger discourse about the nature of Tunisian identity. In particular, this discourse focuses on Tunisia as a cosmopolitan nation that is open to the modern world and posits that this openness is rooted in its history. Although the currency suggests the co-presence of modernity and tradition, tradition is relegated to the rural margins while the urban centers are celebrated as the modern future. Beyond looking at the historical figures represented, the article examines historical absences. Most notably, there are no pre-modern Arab figures on the banknotes, which reflects an ambivalent relationship with an Arab identity. This ambivalence is also reflected in the usages of French and Arabic, which tend to naturalize French in a manner not found in other North African currency.     

Legitimation of Oppression: Response and Reflexivity

The basic question addressed in this article is why people in inferior and devalued strata submit to oppression. It is my thesis that the legitimation of oppression is one of the key issues for subordinate people and that the study of the creation and processes of legitimation among such groups will shed light on the phenomenon of human obedience or of resistance to oppressive rule. The core of the study consists of (1) the development of a model of the legitimation process and (2) the use of examples from the experiences of oppressed groups to illustrate dimensions of this process.     

Reflexivity and the Sociology of Practice

Reflexive theories offer an alternative perspective on sociological intervention and an interpretation of current social conditions that open up new possibilities for the theoretical, professional, and societal recentering of sociological practice as what I will call the sociology of practice. From a reflexive perspective, sociological knowledge and everyday knowledge are related through a process of mutual transformation in ways that foster a convergence of theoretical and applied issues, redraw the boundaries between sociological and the extrasociological activities, and require new forms of lay–expert engagement in which lay knowledge plays a substantive role. Discursive models of engagement are typically advocated, but I argue that an interventive model of lay–expert engagement organized as the sociology of practice optimizes the possibility that engagement will meet reflexive criteria. The sociology of practice is recentered as a substantive body of knowledge relevant to the work of all sociologists and essential for ameliorating social problems.     

Combining New Institutionalisms: Explaining Institutional Change in American Property Insurance

This article combines institutionalisms to explain fundamental change in American property insurance. During the 1950s, the industry shifted from associations to price-competitive markets and vertically integrated firms. I advance two new arguments to explain this shift: First, institutions endogenously generate conditions for change. Second, fundamental change or institutional replacement depends on a dynamic convergence of conditions—market failures, legitimacy crises, new models of order—and the culmination of this dynamic in politics and policies that admit alternatives into fields. Together, these arguments reduce indeterminacies in existing theories of change and shed new light on punctuated equilibria and the politics of transformation.     

Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture,Creativity and Government in the BBC

The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, efficiency, accountability and audit were translated into the public sector. The focus of this paper is an analysis, based on ethnographic research, of the BBC's culture of markets, accountability and audit in the mid to late nineties. Indebted in part to the Foucauldian concern with the relations between forms of political rationality and specific technologies of government, the paper charts the substance and the anti-creative effects of these techniques. But it stresses also their contestability and negotiability, how they evoke ambivalance and coexist with diverse forms of resistance. In particular, through the case of the BBC, the paper sketches the contours of a sociology of reflexivity based on a more differentiated account of reflexivity than is found in the speculative, often normatively-directed writings of Beck, Giddens and Lash. It points to the layering of reflexivities in and around the contemporary BBC, and to the competing and antagonistic reflexivities that may inhabit any social space.     

Institutional constraints on executive greed: stratification systems in American art museums

This paper examines the stratification systems of over 200 organisations, individually represented by the internal income distributions of each organisation, in turn seen as products of executive decision-making. As a first principle, I assume that in any decision-making situation in which organisational leaders must choose between their own welfare and the welfare of their employees, they will almost always select the selfish course of action. In accordance with this axiom of executive greed, the majority of intra-organisational income distributions exhibit a substantial positive or right skew (that is, many people in the lower income levels and very few in the highest). Yet there is sufficient variation to suggest that there are forces which constrain executive greed. Combining the new structuralist perspective on stratification with resource dependency and organisational fields models, the paper examines hypotheses which maintain that the shape of internal distributive systems is affected by: (i) organisational properties, such as size and structural complexity, which empower the employee in labour relations with management; and (ii) highly-institutionalised resource dependencies which constrain income disbursement decisions. Data are taken from a US sample of art museums. The results of the analyses seriously contradict the new structuralist's empowerment accounts of the effects of size and structural complexity on stratification, and suggest that their propositions have been posed at a level which may be far too general. Certain highly-institutionalised resource dependencies are found to promote equality in internal distributive systems.I thank Ann Rotchford, Charles Perrow, Helmut Anheier and three anonymous reviewers for the useful comments that they provided on an earlier version of this paper. I am grateful to Ann Rotchford for her help in preparing the Appendix.     

From White to Western: "Racial Decline" and the Idea of the West in Britain, 1890–1930

Abstract Drawing on British works of imperial and social commentary, this article shows how a literature of white crisis emerged between 1890–1930. It was a literature that, whilst claiming to defend and affirm white identity, in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity. It is shown how these studies drew together a variety of challenges deemed to be facing the white race and, more specifically, how they exhibited a contradictory desire to defend white racial community whilst attacking "the masses". The idea of the West, developing alongside, within and in the wake of this crisis literature, provided a less racially reductive but not necessarily less socially exclusive identity.     

The Decline of Barriers to Immigrant Economic and Political Rights in the American States: 1977–20011

State governments exercise significant powers to regulate the economic and social activities of resident aliens. We review the laws of the six leading states of immigrant settlement regulating access of noncitizens to 23 occupations, updating existing studies from 1946–77. Citizenship requirements for these occupations have plummeted, a change we attribute to federal court decisions, advisory opinions of state attorneys general, and state legislative and administrative action. There are numerous additional citizenship requirements in the statutes of the six states, although these appear to be poorly enforced. The authority of states to regulate their political communities is the most important remaining constitutionally valid basis of citizenship requirements. States define their political community broadly, leading to questionable exclusions of noncitizens from important activities.     

Reflexivity in the age of reconstructive social science

Calls to reflexivity in social science have a long history. This article, after defining the terms endogenous and referential reflexivity, examines that history within several traditions. It argues that this history has tended to prioritize endogenous over referential reflexivity through an over-emphasis on the process of social research compared to what is learnt about social relations. As a result, interactions within the social world and the potential for transformations are not adequately understood, nor are the relations between the social sciences and social life.     

From Coalition to Constraint: Modes of Thought in Contemporary American Conservatism

We advocate a relational approach to understanding contemporary conservatism in the United States. Our approach suggests that conservatism provides a cultural repertoire for adherents to use in adapting to new or changed political situations. We provide evidence based on public opinion data that conservatism is neither a single, monolithic ideology nor a mere coalition of convenience among disparate interest groups. Instead, conservatism should be understood as an amalgam of overlapping but distinct styles of thought, held together through a cultural identification with conservative identity.     

Reflexivity,Process, and Responsibility: Itineraries in Clinical Research

From the start of the discipline, the use of sociological knowledge to produce positive changes has created theoretical/practical and neutral/normative dilemmas, which are currently a crucial point for the development of clinical research. This paper considers the implications related to these dilemmas, examining thoroughly the methodological significance of research itineraries, upon which the main structure of clinical sociological research in Italy is currently based. The importance of the concepts of process, feedback, and responsibility are discussed as the prime ingredients of sociological clinical research.     

Housing Historic Role Models and the American Dream: Domestic Rhetoric and Institutional Decision-Making at the Tenement Museum

How does a social history museum end up obfuscating issues it intends to highlight? How does the Tenement Museum—an institution committed to “challenging the future” by “revealing the past”—come to obscure structural issues related to housing, immigration, and poverty? Through a comparison of participant observation of tours and analysis of institutional archives at the Tenement Museum, I show how decisions made for pragmatic reasons and materialized into domestic spaces obfuscate structural issues, both in the past and the present. Specifically, I demonstrate how the museum advances historic role models and the American Dream through depictions of tenement apartments, thereby displacing the very issues that tenement housing encapsulates. It is not news to sociologists that museums depict selective narratives that reinforce cultural tropes. Nor is it surprising that museums use domestic space as a mnemonic vehicle through which to portray the narratives they select. What is surprising, however, is that this happens in a museum that is invested in challenging the narratives it ends up depicting. Unpacking how this happens is especially pertinent because of the prevalence of museums that depict domestic spaces of the past, given the increased necessity for museums to educate in order to secure funding, and in light of contemporary political debates over housing and immigration.     

高校平安校园建设的思考与实践

高校安全工作是高校的教育与管理工作的重要内容。随着高校的迅猛发展,其办学规模急骤扩大,高校平安校园建设工作的重要性正日益显现出来,同时也正面临着来自校内外的各种因素的挑战。     

The North American Naturalization Gap: An Institutional Approach to Citizenship Acquisition in the United States and Canada1

Using 1990 U.S. Census 5% PUMS and 1991 Canadian Census 3% public and 20% restricted microfiles, this article demonstrates the existence of a North American naturalization gap: immigrants living in Canada are on average much more likely to be citizens than their counterparts in the United States, and they acquire citizenship much faster than those living south of the border. Current theories explaining naturalization differences – focusing on citizenship laws, group traits or the characteristics of individual migrants – fail to explain the naturalization gap. Instead, I propose an institutional approach to citizenship acquisition. States' normative stances regarding immigrant integration (interventionist or autonomous) generate integrated or disconnected institutional configurations between government, ethnic organizations and individuals. Evidence from a case study of Portuguese immigrants living in Massachusetts and Ontario suggests that in Toronto government bureaucrats and federal policy encourage citizenship through symbolic support and instrumental aid to ethnic organizations and community leaders. In contrast, Boston area grassroots groups are expected to mobilize and aid their constituents without direct state support, resulting in lower citizenship levels.     

Theorizing New Media: Reflexivity,Knowledge, and the Web 2.0*

A recent wave of popular and scholarly discourse has hailed the arrival of the Web 2.0, marking a new generation of Internet users who share and collaborate on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and user‐generated communities such as YouTube and Wikipedia. Social and cultural critics have attempted to take stock of the implications of these various technological changes with specific emphasis on the state of knowledge in contemporary society. This article aims to theoretically examine knowledge in the context of new media technologies with particular attention paid to the notion of “reflexivity.” Focusing on the work of Scott Lash, whose theory of reflexivity radically differs from various other interpretations, I suggest that knowledge, in its modern formulation—as reasoned, stable, and linear—must be rethought for the information age, critiquing some of the predominant scholarly and popular media criticisms that suggests media to be mere enhancements of human forms of communication, knowledge, and sense‐making. I conclude by considering some of the ontological dimensions of the transformations in the dynamics of knowledge in new media technologies.     

Bike Messengers and the Really Real: Effervescence,Reflexivity, and Postmodern Identity

Out of more than two thousand bike messengers in New York City, a few hundred participate in alleycats—illegal races held in open traffic. Surrounding this racing scene is a vibrant messenger community. Messengers who race in or attend alleycats carry their messenger identity into all aspects of their lives. Through direct participant observation, this article proposes that alleycats function as Durkheimian rituals for these messengers. Alleycats express the central values of the social world. Lost in collective effervescence, the individual confronts these values as objectified truths, which allow messengers to form stable identities. Further, bicycles, messenger bags, and other objects become sacred symbols within this ritualization process. The ability of messengers to construct such nonreflexive identities is juxtaposed with theories about the self in postmodernity.