Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

“FOB” and “Whitewashed”: Identity and Internalized Racism Among Second Generation Asian Americans

An analysis of 184 in-depth interviews with grown children of Korean and Vietnamese immigrants finds that the racial beliefs, meanings, and stereotypes of the mainstream society shape how they think about coethnics, generate local identities, and deflect stigma from themselves. We examine the terms FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) and whitewashed that were commonly deployed to denigrate coethnic others as too ethnic or too assimilated while casting those at the bicultural middle as the normals. We describe how this system of intraethnic othering serves as a basis for sub-ethnic identities, intraethnic social boundaries, and the monitoring and control of social behavior. We draw on the concept of internalized racial oppression in framing our findings.     

Gender and the residential telephone, 1890–1940: Technologies of sociability

Recent work on gender and technology debunks the claim that household technologies have liberated women from domestic work. The history of telephone use in North America suggests, however, that global conclusions about gender and consumer technologies may be misleading. Although marketed primarily as a business instrument and secondarily as an instrument to facilitate housework, the telephone was, in a sense, appropriated by women for social and personal ends. This paper explores the affinity of women for the telephone, how women in the half-century before World War II used the telephone, and why. It suggests that there is a class of technologies that women have exploited for their own, gender-linked, social and personal ends.     

Freud's “Anna O.”: Social work's Bertha Pappenheim

The story of Anna O. has loomed large in psychoanalytic history, but few social workers know that the young woman, who was so influential in the development of Freud's thinking, became a pioneer social worker in Germany. The story of the transformation of the troubled young woman, who was actually Joseph Breuer's patient, is the focus of this paper. In addition, some of the facts of the case are discussed as social constructions. Anna O./ Bertha Pappenheim participated in the creation of the talking cure and eventually went on to be a leading feminist, developer of social programs for women, and social reformer.     

The Paradoxes of Modernity: Scientific Advances,Environmental Problems,and Risks to the Social Fabric?

Recent reviews have contrasted U.S. sociologists' empirical work on technological risks with the theoretical risk work of Giddens and Beck, but the reality is more complex. Most U.S. sociologists are less likely than Giddens or Beck to see risks as transcending socioeconomic and other divisions, but the United States–based work tends to interpret the trustworthiness of scientific–technical expertise in ways that lie between the arguments of Beck and Giddens. An examination of early nuclear technologies indicates that the United States–based perspectives provide a better fit, for theoretical as well as empirical reasons. The development of nuclear technologies was mixed, rather than high or low, in its competence and trustworthiness, and it created social and environmental risks that did not so much transcend social divisions as to reinforce them.     

Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a transitional object, this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and acting-out behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to reparative regressions.     

Toward a political economy of crime

Summary As Gouldner and Fredrichs have recently pointed out, social science generally, and sociology in particular is in the throes of a paradigm revolution. Predictably, criminology is both a reflection of and a force behind this revolution.The energing paradigm in criminology is one which emphasizes social conflict-particularly conflicts of social class interests and values. The paradigm which is being replaced is one where the primary emphasis was on consensus, and within which deviance or crime was viewed as an aberration shared by some minority. This group had failed to be properly socialized or adequately integrated into society or, more generally, had suffered from social disorganization.The shift in paradigm means more than simply a shift from explaining the same facts with new causal models. It means that we stretch our conceptual framework and look to different facets of social experience. Specifically, instead of resorting inevitably to the normative system, to culture or to socio-psychological experiences of individuals, we look instead to the social relations created by the political and economic structure. Rather than treating society as a full-blown reality (reifying it into an entity with its own life), we seek to understand the present as a reflection of the economic and political history that has created the social relations which dominate the moment we have selected to study.The shift means that crime becomes a rational response of some social classes to the realities of their lives. The state becomes an instrument of the ruling class enforcing laws here but not there, according to the realities of political power and economic conditions.There is much to be gained from this re-focusing of criminological and sociological inquiry. However, if the paradigmatic revolution is to be more than a mere fad, we must be able to show that the new paradigm is in fact superior to its predecessor. In this paper I have tried to develop the theoretical implications of a Marxian model of crime and criminal law, and to assess the merits of this paradigm by looking at some empirical data. The general conclusion is that the Marian paradigm provides a long neglected but fruitful approach to the study of crime and criminal law.     

The Impact of Assessment Procedures on the Relationship between Paper and Pencil and Behavioral Indicators of Social Skill

This study investigated the relationship between paper and pencil measures and molecular behavioral indicators of social skills in three widely used assessment options. A total of 221 students engaged in either a get acquainted or role play interaction, in which they were given instructions and knew they were being observed. A third group engaged in a waiting period interaction, in which they were given no instructions to interact and had no knowledge of being observed. Results showed that subjects in the get acquainted and role play situations scored higher on several measures of social skills than those in the waiting period situation. In addition, there was most variability in the measures of social skills in the waiting period situation. In general, trait measures exhibited poor correspondence with behavioral measures of social skills in all situations. However, state paper and pencil measures of social skills exhibited strong correspondence with behaviors in the waiting period, but not in the get acquainted or role play situations. Implications for the assessment of social communication skills through commonly used assessment procedures are discussed.     

The coming revolution of biotechnology: A critique of Buttel

Frederick Buttel was one of the pioneers in studying the social impacts of biotechnology, claiming originally that it will involve profound changes in social structure. Recently Buttel turned around his argument proposing that, rather than revolutionary, biotechnology is more a substitutionist technological form to be applied to declining sectors of the economy than an epoch-making technology. This paper provides both external and internal critiques of Buttel's new position based on the concept of the third technological revolution, looking at the impact of new technologies as a global and interrelated phenomenon, and not on an individual case-by-case basis. The concluding section suggests the necessity of bringing into the analysis those living in the Third World: 60% of this population lives from agriculture and will be affected by the deployment of agricultural biotechnologies, whether through substitutionism or through totally new products.     

Touristic authenticity,touristic angst,and modern reality

The tourist has become the symbol of a peculiarly modern type of inauthenticity. This paper explores the criticisms that have been directed at the reality experiences of the tourist. In so doing, the following inexhaustive typology of touristic realities is developed: 1) the first-order or true tourist, 2) the second-order or Angst-ridden tourist, 3( the third-order or anthropological tourist, and 4) the fourth-order or spiritual tourist. Each of these types represents a progressively more intense search for reality through travel. Each is, however, criticized for participating in its own form of inauthenticity.After exploring the reality experiences and criticisms of each of these travellers, the paper turns the tables on the cultured despisers of tourism to argue that perhaps the lowly first-order tourist is not so inauthentic after all. True, this traveller may not be having a real heroic adventure, but such is not the goal. Rather, the reality experienced by the first-order tourist is a pleasurable liberation from the normal concerns of everyday life which simultaneously reaffirms commitment to that reality. Quite frequently the first-order tourist is less concerned about having a real experience in the visited place than in experiencing family and friendship relationships-relationships completely ignored by the anti-touristic tourists in their search for authenticity in someone else's reality.The author would like to thank Peter L. Berger, Harry C. Bredemeier, Warren I. Susman, and M. Kathy Kenyon for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported in part by NIMH grant no. 5 T32 NH14660.     

The Practice of Multimodal Approaches, the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Communication, and the Search for Responses

The development of multimodal approachespresents an opportunity for human beings to increasetheir competence in managing complexity, while at thesame time brings a challenge of cross-culturalcommunication. Some claim that two approaches have beenproposed for tackling this challenge: an approach offrameworks and an approach ofdiscourse. Some go further to contenddropping frameworks and taking up discourse. This paper argues that, if it istrue that there exist these two approaches, neither theframeworks nor the discourseapproach alone is sufficient. It is suggested thatresearchers and practitioners may be better equipped byparticipating in discourses with and among frameworks.Employing three metaphors, this paper proposes that, inthe way force-fields andconstellations require and imply each other, both frameworks anddiscourse are necessary for human beings to act as aPeircian fiber-cable in socialproblem-solving.Requests for reprints should be addressed to Zhichang Zhu, Department of Information Systems, Lincoln School of Management, Lincoln LN6 7TS, United Kingdom.     

New-class dissent among social-cultural specialists: The effects of occupational self-direction and location in the public sector

Recent research suggests that new-class dissent is concentrated among the social-cultural specialists Kristol identifies as the principal critics of a business culture. Kohn's research on the micro-foundations of authoritarian conservatism suggests a plausible explanation centered on the subjective effects of occupational self-direction, a variable curiously missing from other models of new-class dissent. An alternative explanation, derived from state-centered theories of the new class, points instead to the concentration of these social-sicence and arts-related occupations outside the commercial economy. Using covariance structure analysis of new survey data, this study finds that occupational self-direction entails a propensity to question systemic inequities and a reluctance to blame the victims of poverty and discrimination. The antibusiness animus of Kristol's counterelites, conversely, arises in spite of, not because of, their highly self-directed work, reflecting instead their concentration in the public and nonprofit sectors.     

Recovering from Homelessness: Determining the “Quality of Sobriety” in a Transitional Housing Program

Recent years have seen fundamental shifts in the objectives and delivery of assistance to the homeless. An early emphasis on emergency shelter and monetary housing assistance has been replaced by a focus on programs designed to blend shelter with an array of social services. In most instances, however, programs combining shelter and social services are designed as transitional; that is, they are intended to help homeless individuals and families move from a position of dependence to one where they can live independently. The emphasis in transitional housing programs is on making homeless people housing ready. This paper concerns the process of assessing housing readiness as observed during eighteen months of fieldwork in a federally supported transitional housing program for formerly homeless single adults. The detailed case study that follows supports three important findings. First, there was virtual unanimity among staff and residents that substance abuse was the cause of their homelessness and the key to its solution. Second, success within the program was defined and operationalized along very specific but well understood normative dimensions that have little to do with the material circumstances in which residents find themselves and everything to do with recovery. Third, recovery—the key to housing readiness in this environment—was measured not by objective measures, i.e., number of months sober, but rather by what was widely referred to as one's quality of sobriety, a subjective and consequently often hotly debated measure of attitude and outlook only loosely related to demonstrable abstinence from alcohol. This last finding, that ultimately housing readiness is a subjective judgment, both increases the discretion of shelter staff and generates a systematic disattention to the individual economic issues that are fundamental to an exit from homelessness.     

Fit and Skill in Employee Selection: Insights from a Study of Headhunters

We draw upon evidence from a qualitative study of headhunters to provide insights into the character and importance of candidate fit and skill for the selection of a broad range of white-collar employees. Headhunters suggest that the fit of a job candidate is assessed at two levels, one corresponding with a general compatibility with organization-level norms, culture, and strategy, the other corresponding more closely with traits and characteristics of the person or persons with whom the job candidate actually interviews. Skill—a factor which is largely neglected by those who tout the importance of fit—also plays an important and independent role in employee selection. Stalls that influence the selection of employees from a pool of candidates tend to be highly specific if not idiosyncratic, and take the form of what headhunters call hot buttons. We conclude by discussing the conceptualization, causes, and implications of fit; we also consider how the importance of fit and hot buttons challenges the explanatory logic of standard accounts of labor-market success.     

Is Managed Mental Health Treatment Psychotherapy?

The corporate takeover of mental health treatment has dramatically affected mental health treatment. Two essential constituents of psychotherapeutic process, the relationship between patient and therapist and the special communicative process associated with a talking treatment, have been significantly compromised. Therapists and patients are being forced to consider whether in the absence of confidentiality, self determination, and a secure treatment partnership managed mental health care can be called psychotherapy. Drawing on several detailed sessions from the managed treatment of a young woman, the writer concludes that the answer is no.     

The prevalence rates of pathological gambling: A look at methods

Planning the gambling environment requires protection of the public's health, safety and welfare. Whereas most public gaming provisions and statutes address the public's fears of organized crime as well as some welfare needs, rarely do they safeguard the public's health regarding the spread of the mental disease known as pathological gambling. Measurement of the prevalence and incidence of this disease would enable policy planners to evaluate both the state's responsibility for an epidemic and the adequacy of publicly funded treatment programs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods which underlie three different estimates of the prevalence rate of pathological gambling and to critique them in the light of sound epidemiological procedure. In 1975, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) of the University of Michigan conducted a national survey and a survey of the state of Nevada on behalf of the U.S. Commission on a National Policy Toward Gambling. Using discriminant function analysis coupled with subjective inspection of cases in the at-risk pool, the researchers estimated rates of probable and potential pathological gamblers. In 1984 and 1985, this author surveyed residents in the Delaware Valley and the state of Ohio using the cumulative clinical signs method which also posited rates of probable and potential pathological gamblers. In 1986, researchers at the Office of Mental Health for the State of New York employed a formal screening device to survey residents and proposed a rate of probable pathological gamblers and a rate of problem — although not pathological — gamblers. All three approaches produced different estimates. The utility of prevalence and incidence rate research in this field is threatened by a lack of consensus about the proper epidemiological procedure to be employed in arriving at these estimates. There is also confusion about the distinction between a probable and a potential pathological gambler. The planning purpose, method, validity and reliability of prevalence rate research about pathological gambling are addressed in this paper.     

Marxism and methodological individualism

Conclusion Analytical or rational choice Marxism explicitly proposes to synthesize non-Marxist methods and Marxist theory. It is therefore in-appropriate to attack it solely by demonstrating that the methods advocated were not Marx's: this is, after all, acknowledged at the outset. (For this reason I have tried to show that both the assumption of MI and the process of reduction are problematic on their own empiricist or positivist terms, and have therefore largely been discarded as viable projects by philosophers of science.) Any attempt to synthesize two such distinct research traditions nonetheless demands some consideration of the metatheoretical problems that one might expect it to encounter, and this is particularly so if Marxist theory is to be recast on the basis of the positivist and empiricist assumptions explicitly rejected by Marx. Curiously, however, the analytical Marxist literature does not address such problems: indeed, metatheoretical considerations are notably absent. Discussions focus instead on particular tools of analysis, e.g., rational choice theory and game theory, as if these were neutral with respect to the underlying philosophical commitments of the two traditions. In fact, of course, these methods do reflect such commitments; after all, the justification for rational choice Marxism, infusing Marxian analyses with scientific rigor, reflects the rejection of the conception of science embodied in the Marxist tradition. By way of a conclusion I therefore briefly discuss the uneasy relationship between rational choice Marxism and classical Marxist theory. I argue that this relationship cannot be one of synthesis because the empiricist assumptions of rational choice Marxism violate the hard-core of the Marxist research tradition in at least three important ways: 1) most generally, its atomistic ontology directly contradicts the relational ontology of Marxist theory; 2) the empiricist conception of science undermines the Marxist conception of social science as critique; and 3) more specifically, rational choice and game theory mark a retreat from the social and relational philosophical anthropology of Marx back to the liberal individualist tradition initiated by Hobbes.The most fundamental incompatibility between analytical Marxism and classical Marxism resides in the differences dividing the atomistic or individualist ontology underpinning empiricism and MI from the relational ontology on which Marxist theory is based. The incompatibility of these commitments demands that a choice be made between them: either only observable individuals exist and are explanatory, or unobservable social structures and relations also exist and have explanatory import, but not both. The commitment to incompatible ontological assumptions prevents the rational choice Marxist project from initiating a progressive problem-shift in the Marxist tradition because these ontological positions form part of the hard-core of each tradition, and as such are irrefutable by [prior] methodological decision. Although changes in some of the assumptions of a research tradition are necessary to stimulate a progressive problem-shift, these changes may not occur in the hard-core, which remains by definition inviolable. That is, an ontological shift indicates not a change of direction within a research tradition, but a change from one research tradition to another. The adoption of a competing ontological stance thus results not in the reinvigoration of Marxist theory, but in its replacement with a competing research tradition. Rational choice Marxism thus cannot, as its practitioners would wish, be the means by which what is true and important in Marxism [can] be more firmly established.A second fundamental difference between choice-theoretic and classical Marxist theory concerns the status of critique in their conceptions of social science. A central component of the Marxist problématique and its notion of science is the critique of existing social structures and institutions with an eye to their (usually revolutionary) transformation. Marx believed, for example, that from the moment that the bourgeois mode of production and the conditions of production and distribution which correspond to it are recognized as historical, the delusion of regarding them as natural laws of production vanishes and the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic social formation, to which capitalism is only the transition.A critique of existing social forms, however, requires both a critique of central explanatory concepts and an ontology in which the social structures and relations to be transformed are real and thus amenable to investigation. Because social relations are themselves the result of human practices, rather than natural, this critical perspective provides an understanding of the options available for radical system transformation. An individualist framework, by denying reality to social structures and relations and taking certain social institutions as natural, relegates social change to piecemeal engineering or incrementalism because it prestructures both the nature of the questions that can be asked about change and the answers that are possible. And in fact, the conservative implications of such a framework were an explicit objective of its proponents. Major structural changes are considered illusory, at best, because they presuppose a holistic or structural, and thus meaningless, conception of society. An empiricist and individualist conception of science therefore produces problemsolving theory rather than critical theory. Individualism subverts the critical element so central to Marxist theory.Finally, rational choice and game theory violate a third element in the hard-core of Marxist theory - its social or relational model of man. For Marx, the essence of man is the ensemble of social relations that are spécific to particular historical social formations. These relations constitute individuals; they confer onto them definite characteristics, motives for action, and so on. Marx thus conceived of human nature as social and mutable, rather than natural and fixed, and rejected the notion of abstract individuals considered in isolation of the social relations in which they are embedded. In fact, the idea of isolated, individual human beings is itself the product of a particular historical context. Rational choice and game theory, however, rest upon just the liberal model of man that Marx rejected. In this model, each person is assumed to be an immutable, isolated (atomistic), and self-interested calculator whose rationality is defined instrumentally. As with their respective ontological commitments, each of these contradictory conceptions of man forms part of the irrefutable hard-core of a distinct research tradition, and thus cannot be altered without stepping outside of that tradition. How, if at all, these two incompatible conceptions of human nature can be fused is thus a problem that must, at the least, be addressed by rational choice Marxists.All this does not mean, however, that game theory is completely incompatible with Marxist analysis. There clearly exist, within the purview of Marxist theory, situations of strategic interaction that would benefit from a game-theoretic representation. The issue of class compromise examined by Przeworski is a good example, as are the collective action problems faced by the capitalist and working classes. There is room here for game theory for two reasons. First, these are situations in which the context and rules of the game, the actors, and the preferences have been established by prior theoretical analyses. Secondly, they occur in societies, specifically modern, western, capitalist ones, in which actors are constituted as reasonable approximations of the rational, calculating maximizers assumed by the liberal model of man underlying rational choice and game theory. Game theory can thus provide a more or less precise representation of, and rigorously clarify the logic of, situations of strategic interaction in particular modern societies. This, however, makes it viable as an end-point of, but not as the foundation for, certain narrowly defined aspects of Marxist analysis.The role of choice-theoretic methods in Marxist theory is thus necessarily limited. The reason is simple - the Marxist problématique revolves around more general, structural questions that precede choice-theoretic analyses because these presuppose the structures and relations underlying the manifest forms of historical social formations and the behavior of individuals within them. That is, Marxist theory is concerned primarily, although not exclusively, with structural analyses, and these must necessarily be completed prior to the analysis of the intentional behavior or interactions of specific individuals. As Oilman says: In history, conceived of as history of the species, [man] is abstracted as a human being as distinct from other animals. In history, conceived of as history of classes, man is abstracted as a class being, the real subject of history on this dimension being classes. In history, conceived of as the history of capitalism... man is abstracted as the typical subject of capitalism... In history, conceived of as the history of modern English (or French or American) capitalism, man is abstracted as particular nations, religions and parties as well as factions of classes, and has begun to acquire the distinguishing qualities that justify individual names and domiciles. Only on this level of abstraction of history can we begin to speak about motivation and choice.Exaggerated claims for the use of game theory (or rational choice theory) thus neglect the fact that all inputs into a choice-theoretic analysis have in fact been established, prior to that analysis itself, by an unreduced structural theory, in this case Marxism. The context of the game, the rules of the game, the preferences of the players, and even the production and identification of the relevant actors all presuppose the structural analysis provided by Marxist theory. Logically, the game starts only after the actors have been constituted, and their order of preferences has been formed as a result of processes that cannot be considered as part of the game. Indeed, not only are these processes not part of the game, but, as was discussed earlier, they cannot be understood within a strictly individualist approach. In additon, as is evident in Elster's own discussion of the solutions to the collective action problem of the working class, the analysis of social change so central to Marxist theory cannot be grasped by game theory. Elster claims that this collective action problem can be surmounted either through a change in the preferences of the working class or through the effective exercise of leadership, thus producing a shift from a prisoner's dilemma to an assurance game. The change that produces either of these shifts is, however, clearly located outside of the game itself. That is, the PD or assurance games do not explain or contribute to our understanding of the actual change that produced the shift to class consciousness and effective collective action. At best, these games function as tools that can highlight the fact that a change has occurred; an additional explanation of that change is still required. Game theory therefore cannot provide solid microfoundations for any study of social structure and social change because all of the traditional givens of game-theoretic Marxism must be established outside the boundaries of game theory by an unreduced, relational Marxist theory that is recognized as meaningful on its own terms.     

Shrewdly irrational

This comment on Professor Etzioni's essay consists of three parts. First, it suggests that much of the evidence he describes, both for and against the rationality hypothesis, is much weaker than it appears. Second, it discusses some additional evidence that poses difficulty for the narrow rationalist view. Finally, it examines Etzioni's caring and sharing evidence, which poses the sharpest challenge of all to the rationalists. It suggests that although caring and sharing is indeed irrational by the conventional standard, there are good reasons why someone who is purely self-interested might wish to become a caring and sharing person. To be such a person, it argues, is to be shrewdly irrational.     

The VFW — A case study in the “iron law of oligarchy” and goal displacement

The iron law of oligarchy is applied to the VFW. Using participant observation and qualitative interviews, membership of the VFW is dichotomized into a leadership oligarchy and a drinking membership. Opinions of members of the two groups about the purposes of the organization and about each other are documented. An historical analysis traces the change in organizational goals over time from promoting nationalism, fraternalism, and special benefits for members to political advocacy of veterans' rights.     

The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology

The conventional interpretation of the race problem in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern race relations in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, but there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by race. A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis.