The Moral Permissibility on In Utero Experimentation

In this paper the argument is made that in utero experimentation which results in abortion is permissible. The discussion then turns to some troubling questions raised by this sort of research. Chief among these are questions concerning limitations placed on the autonomy of the women involved. The argument is made that women ought not change their minds regarding abortion once research has begun. Other issues discussed include objecting to this sort of research on the grounds that it presents a harm to the fetus and whether programs of in utero research condone the practice of abortion.     

‘The smell of the place’: Managerialist culture in contemporary UK business schools

By introducing an intentionally provocative critique of managerialist regimes which typify contemporary UK business school culture, we argue that current business school management practices generate a climate of mistrust and alienation amongst academics. Such a climate is not conducive to a reformative agenda that business schools should be pursuing if they are to improve staff morale and the educational environment. Drawing on Ghoshal's ‘smell of the place’ metaphor to structure this argument, we court deliberate irony and paradox. Rather than draw on heterodox theory to inform our critique we, instead, turn relatively mainstream management and organization theory against itself. Our argument is that even when examined through orthodox lenses, managerialist practices are found wanting and contradict the precepts of much mainstream normative theory.     

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)     

Global Human Rights and State Sovereignty: State Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties, 1965–20011

This research seeks to understand the factors that lead nation‐states to ratify international human rights treaties in the contemporary world, despite their potential cost for state sovereignty. We argue that normative pressure from international society, along with historical contingencies during the Cold War, encouraged many states to ratify these treaties. We present an event‐history analysis of ratification of seven key international human rights treaties in 164 countries in the period between 1965 and 2001. The results lend support to the world society argument as well as to our historical argument and also specify that normative pressure and imitation have been important factors shaping states’ decisions to ratify international human rights treaties.     

Utility, informed preference, or happiness: Following Harsanyi's argument to its logical conclusion

Harsanyi (1997) argues that, for normative issues, informed preferences should be used, instead of actual preferences or happiness (or welfare). Following his argument allowing him to move from actual to informed preferences to its logical conclusion forces us to use happiness instead. Where informed preferences differ from happiness due to a pure concern for the welfare of others, using the former involves multiple counting. This “concerning effect” (non-affective altruism) differs from and could be on top of the “minding effect” (affective altruism) of being happy seeing or helping others to be happy. The concerning/minding effect should be excluded/included in social decision. Non-affective altruism is shown to exist in a compelling hypothetical example. Just as actual preferences should be discounted due to the effects of ignorance and spurious preferences, informed preferences should also be discounted due to some inborn or acquired tendencies to be irrational, such as placing insufficient weights on the welfare of the future, maximizing our biological fitness instead of our welfare. Harsanyi's old result on utilitarianism is however defended against criticisms in the last decade. Harsanyi (1997) argues, among other things, that in welfare economics and ethics, what are important are people's informed preferences, rather than either their actual preferences (as emphasized by modern economists) or their happiness (as emphasized by early utilitarians). The main purpose of this paper is to argue that, pursuing Harsanyi's argument that allows him to move from actual to informed preferences to its logical conclusion forces us to happiness as the ultimately important thing. The early utilitarians were right after all! Since I personally approve of Harsanyi's basic argument, I regard myself as his follower who becomes more Catholic than the Pope. (It is not denied that, in practice, the practical difficulties and undesirable side-effects of the procedure of using happiness instead of preferences have to be taken into account. Thus, even if we ultimately wish to maximize the aggregate happiness of people, it may be best in practice to maximize their aggregate preferences in most instances. This important consideration will be largely ignored in this paper.) The secondary objective is to give a brief defence of Harsanyi's (1953, 1955) much earlier argument for utilitarianism (social welfare as a sum of individual utilities) that has received some criticisms in the last decade. The argument (e.g. Roemer 1996) that Harsanyi's result is irrelevant to utilitarianism is based on the point that the VNM (von Neumann-Morgenstern) utility is unrelated to the subjective and interpersonally comparable cardinal utility needed for a social welfare function. Harsanyi's position is defended by showing that the two types of utility are the same (apart from an indeterminate zero point for the former that is irrelevant for utilitarianism concerning the same set of people). Received: 29 May 1997 / Accepted: 3 November 1997     

Durkheim and The Structure of Social Action*

The analysis of Durkheim in The Structure of Social Action is integral to Parsons's discussion of the utilitarian-positivist tradition and the emergence of a voluntaristic theory of action from it. The four “stages” of theoretical argument in Durkheim can be related directly to the four defining elements of the “utilitarian dilemma,” namely empiricism, rationality, atomism, and the randomness of ends. The most questionable aspect of Parsons's argument is the alleged stubbornness of Durkheim's empiricism. On the other hand, much of the criticism of Parsons's argument, by Pope in particular, although also by Scott and Warner, Is either misdirected or itself questionable. The development and conclusions of Durkheim's moral sociology are as Parsons claims, and form a viable basis for a non-positivist theory of action.     

Discussion of Margrit Shildrick's “Dangerous Discourses” as It Relates to Need for Attitudinal Change Amongst the Psychoanalytic Community

In this brief essay, I review Catherine Opie's midcareer retrospective at the Guggenheim focusing on 3 of her self-portraits that elaborate on her leatherdyke identity. Interpreting these works through the scholarship of Ann Cvetkovich and the literature of Dorothy Allison, I read the progression from Self-Portrait/Cutting to Self-Portrait/Pervert to Self-Portrait/Nursing as a photographic argument regarding how sexuality can be generatively constituted through traumatic experience.     

Child Migration in the US and Spain: Towards a Global Border Regime?

In The New Politics of Immigration, Professor Catherine Dauvergne proposes that as migration policies converge at the global level, the traditional difference between settler societies and former European colonies is becoming irrelevant. To test this argument, this article addresses the impact of externalization, militarization, detention and deportation on unaccompanied migrant children along the southern Spanish and US borders. I conclude that the combined used of these strategies is designed to keep all unwanted migrants away from the physical border of the state, regardless of their background, and prevents children from accessing specific protections. Current border policy in these two countries shows the primacy of national security concerns over human rights and supports Dauvergne’s argument that distinctions between former colonies and settler societies are disappearing. The evidence considered here points towards an increasingly restrictive and punitive global border regime, but one with regional variations.     

Institutional Ethnography and Experience as Data

Experience, as concept, is contested among feminists as to its epistemological status, thus its usefulness in knowledge claims. Institutional ethnography (Smith 1987) is a feminist methodology that nonetheless relies fundamentally on people's experience. Not as Truth, nor the object of inquiry, but as thepoint d'appui for sociological inquiry. This article offers a demonstration of institutional enthnography using observational and interview data that show experience as methodologically central to a trustworthy analysis. A moment in the work lives of nursing assistants in a long-term care setting is captured by a participant observer. The analysis produces two lines of argument. One is methodological; it is argued that nursing assistants' experiences are an entry into the social relations of the setting that, when mapped and disclosed, make those experiences understandable in terms of the ruling arrangements permeating both the organization and their own experiences. The other argument is substantive; the inquiry uncovers how a quality improvement' strategy in a long term care hospital in Canada is reorganizing caregivers' values and practices toward a market orientation in which care appears to be compromised. Use of experience as data in this approach holds the analysis accountable to everyday/everynight actualities in a lived world.     

Social theory’s “constituency”

The argument is made that the relation between theory and research has become tenuous in American sociology during the recent past, and that during the earlier decades of this century the nature of that relationship was different. A suggestion is made for the reacquaintance of empirical research and its theoretical underpinning. He wroteWeber, Irrationality, and Social Order, co-editedHermeneutics, edited and published the journalHistory of Sociology for some years, is now editor ofSociological Theory, and has moved to the University of California at Riverside. Please send all correspondence to: Alan Sica, Department of Sociology, University of California-Riverside, Riverside CA 92521-0419.     

Social fields,subfields and social spaces at the scale of empires: explaining the colonial state and colonial sociology

This article develops a series of arguments about social fields, subfields, and social spaces that can help us understand empires and colonies. First, we have to assume that the scale of fields is not always coextensive with the boundaries of the national state but is often much larger, or smaller. Imperial fields are among the most spatially extensive ones, though they may not be as territorially extensive as truly global fields. Second, we need to make a distinction between imperial fields and imperial social spaces (based on Bourdieu's distinction between social fields and social spaces). The third argument is that colonies in modern empires were characterized by two different kinds of fields: fields that were simply extended into the overseas territories, versus completely separate fields unique to one or more of the colonies. The colonial state is an example of a field that is specific to the colony. By contrast, scientific fields were often simply extended from the metropole into the colonies, encompassing both. The fourth argument concerns subfields. Transported into imperial realms, this distinction suggests that some colonial offshoots of fielded metropolitan practices do not constitute separate fields but are nonetheless differentiated from their main overarching field. These four points are illustrated with examples from British, French and German imperial policy, colonial statecraft and colonial sociology.     

I am not that Caitlin: a critique of both the transphobic media reaction to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover shoot and of passing

In this article I discuss and critique transphobic media reactions to the celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s 2015 Vanity Fair cover shoot. I then consider these in the light of Garfinkel, H. [1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall] concept of ‘passing’ in his celebrated case story of Agnes and argue that ‘passing’ is often conflated with ‘being out’. I argue that the two are significantly different and claim that the former is implicitly based on a public lie. I use several auto-ethnographic narratives to illustrate the argument.     

Migrant identities: Personal memory and the construction of selfhood

Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason explicitly asks the reader to examine the limits of its argumentative structure. Just as Spivak has recently argued that the form of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy is paratactic (a way of using language that withholds connections and conjunctions), Spivak’s own A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is carefully constructed to force the reader to supply links between the sections of the text. In this sense, Spivak achieves a poetic effect, one that is not unrelated to the contemporary paratactic prose poetry of Harryette Mullen. The formal parataxis of Spivak’s work also serves to reflect an argument in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason about the difficulty of forging solidarity among disparate migrant and racialized groups in the Western metropolis.     

Positional satisfaction and state welfare

Fred Hirsch's book. The Social Limits of Growth (1977) has proved enormously fruitful in provoking and structuring debate about the relationship between economic development and individual satisfaction in advanced democracies. In this paper, we attempt to review the approach of the book, to explain why it is so influential and to test one aspect of the argument.     

OUTSOURCING AND UNIONIZATION: A TALE OF MISALLOCATED (RESISTANCE) RESOURCES

While many believe the growth in outsourcing contributed to the decline in U.S. unionization up to the 1990s, this argument has never been investigated systematically. In this article, we analyze the effect of outsourcing on unionization between 1973 and 1993. Instrumental variables estimation shows outsourcing contributes to higher quasirents and industry productivity. We find the union wage premium increases with the extent of outsourcing—both for workers that are substitutable by outsourcing services and workers in jobs that are not substitutes of the tasks being outsourced. Finally, we find no support for the claim that outsourcing reduces unionization. (JEL J5, L2, L6)     

STABILIZATION POLICY: A RECONSIDERATION

Should stabilization policy be a macroeconomic priority? Most central banks consider it a goal, but Robert Lucas has contended that policies to stabilize output, even if effective, yield negligible welfare gains. This article critiques Lucas's argument. Existing literature suggests nontrivial benefits from stabilization due to nonlinearity of the social welfare function and of the short‐run Phillips curve. Our analysis and examination of the evidence from periods of prolonged high unemployment also suggest further significant gains to stabilization since the “accelerationist” hypothesis does not seem to hold in times of very low inflation. (JEL E61, E63)     

Towards a historical sociology of constitutional legitimacy

This article has two primary objectives. First, it sets out the methodological argument that the conventional antinomy between normative and sociological approaches to questions of state legitimacy depends on a series of false constructions, and that normative and sociological – or specifically historical–sociological – analyses of states and the processes by which they obtain legitimacy can be (and ought to be) mutually reinforcing. This argument hinges on the claim that historical sociology should renounce some of its common presuppositions regarding the coercive functions of state power and reformulate itself as a normative social science, identifying and promoting models of statehood likely to obtain legitimacy in modern differentiated societies. Second, it sets out the more substantive argument that the legitimization of states can be observed both as an evolutionary or adaptive dimension of state formation and as a process of theoretical self-reflection in which the societies where states are located construct and refine the most adequate form for the transmission of the power they designate as political. In this respect, the article questions common assumptions about politics and legitimacy and makes a case for a change of paradigm in the analysis of these concepts. Through this change of paradigm, politics itself and the methods used for securing legitimacy for politics are constructed as abstracted articulations of a society’s own needs and exigencies. The article borrows elements from the systemic-functionalist sociology of Niklas Luhmann to develop the argument. In this context, the article also uses historical case studies to outline a theory of constitutions and constitutional rights. This theory explains how constitutions and constitutional rights help to generate legitimacy for states by enabling modern political systems, both normatively and functionally, to reflect and stabilize their position in society, to control the volume of politics in a society, and to elaborate socially adequate techniques for applying and restricting political power. The article concludes by suggesting that historical–sociological analyses of the functions of rights and constitutions can provide a key to proposing both normatively and sociologically founded models of legitimate statehood.

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The human genome diversity project

This article examines the relationship between indigenous sovereignty and identification as instanced by the legal and political debates informing the Human Genome Diversity Project. The HGDP proposes to map the history of human origins and migrations by the identification and measurement of populations. I analyze the impact of the criticisms of this agenda and methodology by indigenous nations, organizations, and advocacy groups, focusing on the incommensurability of populations with indigenous identifications as peoples. My argument is that the work of identification is the mediation of the terms and conditions of indigenous sovereignty in the very real places where their intellectual property rights and the ethics of scientific research are negotiated.     

Privacy encounters in Teledialogue

Privacy is a major concern when new technologies are introduced between public authorities and private citizens. What is meant by privacy, however, is often unclear and contested. Accordingly, this article utilises grounded theory to study privacy empirically in the research and design project Teledialogue aimed at introducing new ways for public case managers and placed children to communicate through IT. The resulting argument is that privacy can be understood as an encounter, that is, as something that arises between implicated actors and entails some degree of friction and negotiation. An argument which is further qualified through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The article opens with a review of privacy literature before continuing to present privacy as an encounter with five different foci: what technologies bring into the encounter; who is related to privacy by implication; what is entailed by the spaces of Teledialogue; how privacy relates to projected futures; and how privacy is also an encounter between authority and care. In the end, it is discussed how privacy conceptualised as an encounter is not already there surrounding people or places but rather has to be traced in the specific and situated relations between implicated actors, giving rise to different normative concerns in each case.     

The Ghosts of Knowing Commentary on Janice Haaken's Pillar of Salt

In Pillar of Salt, Janice Haaken makes an ambitious attempt to examine what has become a passionate, contentious debate about recovered memories of childhood abuse. Haaken examines several—sometimes conflicting—perspectives on recovered memory syndrome, which themselves yield diverse interpretations of the status of knowledge and the implications of multiple, even oppositional positionalities. The least ambiguous aspect of Haaken's argument is that women have found their voices and identities in the cultural Zeitgeist of sex abuse discourse. Although Haaken's social constructionist view is broad, I am concerned about the ways in which the therapeutic structure of retrieval misrepresents and flattens the epistemological complexities that shape these discussions, while remaining largely unacknowledged.