Facilities and HIV prevention in bathhouse and sex club environments

This project evaluated the extent to which businesses with a primary purpose of providing opportunities for sexual encounters between men (e.g., bathhouses and sex clubs) have implemented strategies that target their customers with important HIV and STD prevention messages. Between October 1996 and February 1997, we conducted structured telephone interviews with 63 businesses throughout the United States in order to describe their facilities and their HIV education and prevention efforts. Types of facilities offered were related to what businesses called themselves and the kinds of sex space they provided. All of the businesses reported that they provided condoms and lubricant on site; 95% provided educational materials such as posters and flyers about HIV/AIDS; and 40% provided HIV testing on site, with half of these also providing some type of STD testing. Although some level of HIV prevention and educational efforts by these businesses are described, further investigation into their efficacy is required.     

Political Violence and Legitimation: The Episode of Colonial Cyprus

Guerrilla warfare often becomes popular despite the fact that many aspects of it are morally objectionable. Guerrilla groups too, instead of being considered terrorists, often become legitimate political actors. How does this happen? How does the process of legitimation of political violence work? I argue that this process is social and cognitive at the same time, and that a framework for its explanation must be able to account for this dualism. I build such an analytical framework on McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly’s approach to social movement studies and on the general sociology of Pierre Boudieu. I use it to analyze the legitimation process of the guerilla anti-colonial campaign in Cyprus. In the legitimation process of Cyprus, two social mechanisms proposed by McAdam et al. played a critical role at an early stage—the mechanisms of certification and of boundary-drawing. Later, a social mechanism that I term “valorization” was central as well. To appreciate the effectiveness of these mechanisms, however, I argue that the dispositional facet of the legitimation process must be accounted for as well. I do this through field analysis, focusing in particular on positions of social and symbolic power. The analysis of the legitimation process in Cyprus offers lessons for the study of other similar processes. By showing how the three mechanisms worked effectively, and also showing the limits of their effectiveness, this analysis offers readily comparable causal analogies     

Branded Solidarity in Fair Trade Communication on Facebook

The objective of fair trade to achieve economic justice through markets depends on establishing, via moral education, bonds of solidarity between Northern consumers and impoverished Southern producers. Moral education is increasingly realised by commercial brands who take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media. This article analyses the discursive construction of solidarity in the brand communication of Pukka (UK) and Pizca del Mundo (Poland) on Facebook. It identifies 3 discourses of solidarity: ‘solidarity through legitimation’, which presents the rationale for solidarity with Southern producers; ‘solidarity through affinity’, which constructs a moral economy between Southern producers and Northern consumers; and ‘solidarity through lifestyle’, which proposes everyday actions that can be undertaken by consumers to support Southern producers. These discourses are employed by the brands to different extents, with Pizca del Mundo attempting to establish a fair trade market in Poland and Pukka with an aim to increase sales of their fair trade products. The article concludes that primarily the discourses of ‘solidarity through legitimation’ and ‘solidarity through affinity’ serve moral education whose objective is to generate sustained commitment towards Southern producers as distant others.     

The Role of Values and Unity in Family Businesses

This study tests the application of an ecosystems perspective on family businesses. Specific focuses are given to values, resources and unity within family businesses. Two separate samples are examined, the American Family Business Survey and a multilevel sample. Results from this study support the ecosystems perspective. Family businesses are shown to vary by their value for family growth in comparison to business growth. This value variation across family businesses was shown to predict internal goals and resource transfers within family businesses. This study also shows the benefit to family businesses in unifying values across individuals, as unity of values is a stronger predictor of satisfaction even when controlling for the family business’ tendency to privilege the family or business growth.     

Market Rationality Inside Voluntary Sector: An Analysis of Five Organizations in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil

What we now understand as rational and logical in today’s world provides a mental scheme to take action, based on a framework of premises and values. These rules aim to maximize the utility of consequences, despite of any subjective value. Weber (Economy and Society, 1978) classified this scheme as an “instrumental rationality”, characterized by being guided by the goals, means, and consequence of the action. On the other hand, he also defined “substantive rationality”, postulated on the values of the subject, and not guided by any consequences of action. This study acknowledges that NGOs (non-governmental organizations) must belong to a field other than that of economic businesses, because they are based on different rationalities, especially when they encompass the observation in organizations that work for social transformation. A field study was made with five nonprofit organizations whose stated goals were social transformation, seeking to identify influences that the adoption of instrumental rationality imposes on accomplishing the expected objectives for these organizations. Contingencies were found that benefit from using instrumentality in such organizations, such as the need for self-subsistence, the area where they work, size of the organization, influence of the leader and so on. The conclusion is that the lack of consciousness of the market’s influence on them very often causes them to uncritically and bluntly absorb the typical organizational dynamics of economic business, which has strong potential to corrupt their conceptual motivations, when guiding them strategically through the consequences of actions.     

Gender Differences in Perceived Business Success and Profit Growth Among Family Business Managers

Using data from the 1997–2000 National Family Business Surveys (NFBS), this study investigated the effect of gender on business success and profit growth among family businesses. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) results indicate that all else being equal, female managers perceived their businesses as more successful than male managers, and they reported more profit growth between 1996 and 1999 than male managers. The results of the dummy variable interaction approach also show that a differential response existed in profit growth over time between female and male managers in relation to health status, business liabilities, business size, and whether the business was home-based. This study concludes that there are many distinct differences between male and female managers in business performance.     

Rethinking Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Violent Political Conflict

Analytic and conceptual ambiguity associated with the study of legitimacy have motivated debates over the utility of this construct in the analysis of violent political conflict. Using these debates as a point of departure, I review several challenges that have limited the study of legitimacy in this area and discuss two features of legitimation that have gone widely overlooked: (i) the asymmetric causes and effects of legitimacy and illegitimacy, and (ii) the relational dynamics of legitimation. I argue that turning explicit analytic attention to the asymmetry and relationality of legitimacy and illegitimacy allows us to overcome the most intractable challenges associated with the analysis of legitimation in violent conflict.     

Citizens' Perceptions of the Neighborhood Council

Abstract

The paper presents the findings of a study that explored an attempt to establish neighborhood councils in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The Arab residents participating in the study recognized the importance of the neighborhood council, but expressed reservations about the extent to which the model is suited to a traditional society such as theirs. The obstacles encountered in the attempt to establish neighborhood councils derive from the residents' perception of themselves as being incapable of managing their lives autonomously. Moreover, the residents are resistant about having the neighborhood council model imposed on them by a foreign government, to which they have not given political legitimation. In this connection, it is particularly interesting to consider the responses and perceptions of Arab residents with higher education, who have expressed skepticism about the model and about the processes of participatory democracy that it represents. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail     

Bourdieu and Adorno: Converging theories of culture and inequality

The theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno both conceive culture as legitimating the inequalities of modern societies. But they postulate different mechanisms of legitimation. For Bourdieu, modern culture is a class culture, characterized by socially ranked symbolic differences among classes that make some seem superior to others. For Adorno, modern culture is a mass culture, characterized by a socially imposed symbolic unity that obscures class differences behind a facade of leveled democracy. In his later writings, however, Bourdieu’s theory converges with that of Adorno. He too begins to privilege the high culture of intellectuals over mass culture by employing the universal standard of autonomy from economic interests. But there remains one vital difference between these theories. Bourdieu grounds the origins of a critical, autonomous culture in specific social structures, while Adorno grounds it in technology.     

A tainted trade? Moral ambivalence and legitimation work in the private security industry1

The private security industry is often represented - and typically represents itself - as an expanding business, confident of its place in the world and sure of its ability to meet a rising demand for security. But closer inspection of the ways in which industry players talk about its past, present and future suggests that this self-promotion is accompanied by unease about the industry's condition and legitimacy. In this paper, we analyse the self-understandings of those who sell security - as revealed in interviews conducted with key industry players and in a range of trade materials - in order to highlight and dissect the constitutive elements of this ambivalence. This analysis begins by describing the reputational problems that are currently thought to beset the industry and the underlying fears about its status and worth that these difficulties disclose. We then examine how security players seek to legitimate the industry using various narratives of professionalization. Four such narratives are identified - regulation, education, association and borrowing - each of which seeks to justify private security and enhance the industry's social worth. What is striking about these legitimation claims is that they tend not to justify the selling of security in market terms. In conclusion we ask why this is the case and argue that market justifications are 'closed-off' by a moral ambivalence that attaches to an industry trading in products which cannot guarantee to deliver the condition that its consumers crave.     

How parents decide to participate and save in their children's asset-building accounts: Implications for practice, policy, and theory

Asset-based social welfare programs focus on helping low to moderate income citizens accumulate wealth in the form of home ownership, savings, small businesses, and higher education. Individual development accounts, savings accounts in which account holders' deposits are matched, are a vehicle often used in these programs. In a national demonstration of children's savings accounts (individual development accounts for children) parents participated in focus groups to discuss how they decided to enroll in this asset-building program, how they decided to open accounts for their children, and how they saved in these accounts. Findings from this study have implications for assetbuilding policy and practice, and institutional theories of saving.     

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.     

The Differences in Financial Structure Between Women- and Men-Owned Family Businesses

Lenders often are faced with the challenge of evaluating the financial success of a business or a proposed business by examining the financial records of the household, reasoning that an assessment of the household's financial position should be a plausible indicator of the financial status of the business. Utilizing data from the recently released Family Business Survey, this study uses financial information about both the family and the business to examine the relationship between household financial indicators and business financial indicators for women- and men-owned family businesses. The results suggest that, while household financial statements may be good indicators for men-owned businesses, they appear to be much less reliable for women-owned businesses.     

Diversification of Korean housebuilding firms: The pattern and motives between 1980 and 1995

The Korean housebuilding industry made rapid growth during the 1980s and 1990s and the industry has been restructured. One of its outstanding characteristics has been the diversification of housebuilding firms. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of government regulations on the restructuring of the Korean housebuilding industry. The extent and pattern of diversification were examined via an analysis of the period 1980–1995, and the motives for diversification were investigated using interviews and empirical modelling. The results show that Korean housebuilding firms were diversified into both related and unrelated businesses during the rapid growth period. The conclusion is that building firms tended to diversify into other businesses in order to use resources more efficiently. In particular they extended their activities into counter-cyclical businesses in order to compensate for business loss due to tight government regulation. The diversification is seen as a survival strategy under a regulated environment as well as a long-term growth strategy.     

THE EXXON FACTOR: The Roles of Corporate and Academic Science in the Emergence and Legitimation of a New Global Model of Sequence Stratigraphy

In the 1970s, a paradigm shift took place in petroleum exploration with the development, within Exxon's research laboratories, of a new model for oil exploration based on seismic stratigraphy and global sea level change. We demonstrate that this approach was widely accepted by the academic and petroleum geology communities outside Exxon in the absence of data, replication, or independent peer review. We attribute this acceptance to the "Exxon Factor", that is, others' perceptions of Exxon's reputational capital and control over the material means of scientific production. We further demonstrate that the model's legitimacy was not accepted within Exxon, where it was developed, until after external legitimation took place. Using Strauss's social worlds/arena analysis, concepts of technoscience, disciplines, and the new knowledge studies, and situational analysis, we consider elements and interactions in the situations in which this scientific knowledge was produced and assessed. We conclude that university and industry geologists validated the scientific knowledge of the other using nonscientific perceptions that they equated with scientific authority.     

Beyond answers: dimensions of the advice network

In this paper, we report the result of a research project investigating social aspects of knowledge sharing and development. Prior research in a consulting firm revealed that respondents recognized five kinds of informational benefits when consulting others: solutions, meta-knowledge, problem reformulation, validation and legitimation. We employed these dimensions in a systematic network analysis of a different sample of people (human resource managers in a large conglomerate), using each of the five benefits as kinds of social relations. Two general research questions guided the analysis. First, how are these relations related to each other (multiplexity)? Do individuals obtain all of the benefits from the same individuals, or do they create balanced portfolios of complementary contacts that provide different benefits? Second, what properties and shapes do the networks induced by these relations form (structure)? What is the basis for who is tied to whom on each relation? The fundamental result emerging from both research questions is that the five relations seem to form a unidimensional scale such that a contact who provides any given benefit is also very likely to provide all the benefits that are lower on the scale. Position on this scale seems to index underlying dimensions of social solidarity rather than individual attributes such as status. Consequently, relations at the end of the scale (e.g. legitimation) were more homophilous and proved to be strongly diagnostic of subgroup boundaries, a fact which could be quite useful in consulting or other applied contexts. This research contributes to the literature on knowledge management by revealing diverse ways that consulting others facilitates knowledge creation and utilization. The research also contributes to social network analysis by examining meanings and relationships among social relations, an area that is understudied. We found that the five benefits, treated as social relations, formed an entailment structure consistent with a Guttman scale. We also found that relations lower in the scale flowed smoothly across historical organizational boundaries whereas relations higher in the scale did not.     

The Influence of Undergraduate Students' Engagement Practices and Their Institutional Environment on Academic Achievement

This study examines relationships between students' demographic characteristics, campus engagement practices, institutional support, and grade point average (GPA) utilizing a social-ecological analytic framework. The study sample consisted of 355 freshmen and 315 seniors attending a historically Black institution (HBI). Engagement practices and institutional support were assessed using the National Survey of Student Engagement. Findings revealed significant associations between class status, mother's education, and GPA, but demographic factors, institutional support, and engagement practices did not predict academic achievement at the selected HBI. Parents' education was positively associated with students' extracurricular involvement. Practice and policy implications are discussed for social work professionals working in college settings.     

Stillborn chrysalis: reflections on the fate of national culture in neoliberal Zambia

Abstract In this article I use the analysis of a Zambian on‐line magazine to explore the problems and limits of nationalism in neoliberal times. The magazine, Chrysalis, was a bold attempt by a group of young, educated, cosmopolitan elites to craft a new Zambian nationalism for the information age. The discussions that unfolded in the magazine illustrate some of the difficulties in creating national culture and nationalist discourses of legitimation under conditions of neoliberalism.