DRUG ABUSE AND IDENTITY:

The quest to link micro and macro phenomena in symbolic interactionism has gained considerable attention over the years. The present study builds on this endeavor by linking micro and macro phenomena in the transformation of identities accompanying the movement into drug addiction. A qualitative approach is employed, featuring in depth interviewing with a purposive sample ( N = 30) of currently abstinent drug addicts from the 12-Step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.) in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. Findings indicate that identity change is a product of both micro ("ego identity discomfort,""status passages,""and a loss of control in defining one's identity") and macro phenomena ("social appraisal sources" and a "social climate conducive to drug use") and, thus, offers empirical support to symbolic interactionsm's ability to deal with the macro as well as the micro. Findings also uncover insights into the etiology of drug addiction and pinpoint new directions for combatting substance abuse.     

Disaffiliation from a New Religious Movement: The Importance of Self and Others in Exit

Challenging the popular belief that people who join new religious movements (NRMs) become “entrapped,” this study describes the way in which 23 former members of 11 different “cults” personally negotiated disaffiliation. The current findings support previous studies that posit exit as a resolution to unresolved doubts and dissonances, and contribute to this literature by suggesting that the nature of these dissonances, and the way in which exit constitutes a “solution” to these dissonances may vary. It is suggested that for approximately half of the participants in this study, the dissonances that precipitated exit, were relatively minor, primarily caused by organizational changes and inconsistencies in the teachings. While generally doubts were resolved privately and commitment sustained, exit occurred when alternate discourses or other identity resources became available through which doubts could become resolved. The remaining participants describe the conflicts that precipitated disaffiliation as pertaining to tensions between the groups' expectation of conformity and their sense of autonomy. These participants describe exit as a solution to the stress and emotional exhaustion of membership. To make sense of these different disaffiliation narratives, symbolic interactionist notions of the self as constructed in both the realm of “Self” and “Others” are applied.     

From Affirmative Action to Diversity: Critical Reflections on Graduate Education in Sociology

This article explores the contradictory results of the shift from a race‐conscious affirmative action discourse to a broader “diversity embrace” that advocates tolerance, equality, and respect for cultural differences on university campuses. Drawing on critical race theory and research on the practice of affirmative action in organizations, we argue that the diversity embrace subsumes recognition of racialized histories, social relations, and practices in favor of a “color‐blind” rhetoric that reinforces negative assumptions about the academic merit and worthiness of underrepresented minority students (URM). Our review of the status and condition of URM graduate students in sociology departments reveals that minority inclusion is part of a larger strategy that emphasizes individual and group differences rather than corrective action for past discrimination. We find that access and inclusion in graduate programs in sociology have been uneven with relatively few departments producing a majority of URM sociology doctorates. The diversity embrace obscures their continual low representation in graduate programs, fosters professionalization practices detrimental to these students, and undermines efforts to create a “critical mass” of faculty of color. Such practices constitute a racial project that preserves White privilege at the individual and institutional levels.     

Research: AA is better pathway to abstinence than psychotherapy

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is the best way to get to abstinence, according to a comprehensive literature review published last week in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. The study, “Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12‐step programs for alcohol use disorder” evaluates 35 studies and shows that AA was almost always more effective than psychotherapy in achieving alcohol abstinence, and that it was also less expensive. According to co‐author Keith Humphreys, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the reason AA works is the social interaction. “If you want to change your behavior, find some other people who are trying to make the same change,” he said.     

Critical Thinking and Creativity in a Social Work Diversity Course: Challenging Students to “Think Outside the Box”

The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) mandates that all accredited social work programs teach critical thinking skills. Doing so can be a daunting task because asking thoughtful questions and challenging the status quo are actions not often affirmed or rewarded. This article describes a human behavior social work diversity course that fulfills the CSWE's requirement by challenging students to think critically, engage in self-reflection, and utilize creativity while interacting with issues of race and ethnicity, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. The overall goal of the course is to teach students to “think outside the box.”     

Incorporating Spirituality and the Strengths Perspective into Social Work Practice with Addicted Individuals

Abstract

In the last two decades, the social work profession began to confront the professional avoidance of alcoholics and other drug addicts, and discussions of spirituality. While acknowledging the importance of 12-Step Programs of Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous, we also acknowledge that spirituality is a major aspect of addiction and recovery from an addiction. The authors present the Strengths Perspective and apply key concepts to Steps 1-3 of the 12-Steps to increase our understanding of addiction and recovery from alcoholism and other drug addiction. The article concludes that social workers must continue to increase their understanding of the recovery and spiritual issues of alcoholics and other drug addicts.     

Transformative Complicity and Cultural Humility: De- and Re-Constructing Higher Education Mentorship for Under-represented Groups

The American Sociological Association, academic administrators, and underrepresented faculty have voiced serious concerns about higher education exclusionary practices for more than a decade. A perspective called “home ethnography” is introduced as a methodological tool for understanding the situation of under-represented faculty. This home ethnographic study discusses doctoral trajectories in elite American university social science and social service programs. Varied mentorship sources and reactive/pro-active strategies of under-represented academics are analyzed through the lens of the social work codes of ethics and the alignment between the explicit and the implicit curriculum. The counterpoints and contradictions arising in mentor/mentee relationships, even within presumed similarities of ethnic identity, are addressed from critical feminist, race, and postcolonial theories. Emancipatory confluences that create potential advancement, despite almost insurmountable odds, are revealed through the paradigms of “transformative complicity,” “cultural humility,” and “empowerment.” In order to generate systemic change, managed risk-sharing and multi-sector inter-institutional mentorship are strongly recommended. These actions are more likely to trigger humanizing generative processes that lead to true inclusive diversity in higher education.     

The Plexiglass Ceiling: The Careers of Black Women Lawyers

The study describes the ways in which race and gender shaped the career transitions of Black women lawyers, whose careers were affected by the opportunities generated by the Civil Rights Movement during the decade between 1973 and 1983. The author concludes that although the affirmative action policies and programs that diminished discrimination at the entry level of the profession dramatically increased the number of Black women lawyers during the period of study, a “Plexiglass ceiling” limited their choices. Their careers have been influenced negatively by both race and gender, which circumscribed their opportunities to practice in high status, powerful, and financially remunerative sectors of the profession.     

Lifting the Veil: African American Images and the European American Gaze

Patricia Hill Collins presents and discusses gender and gender role norms, behaviors, and ideologies among African Americans in an interdisciplinary diagnostic endeavor that calls attention to health, economic, behavioral, and psychosocial patterns related to social injustice and inequality. Collins presents several popular culture, mass media, and social science literature topics that call for a progressive Black sexual politics necessary for African American empowerment. A most crucial and apparent point of Collins's discussion is that improvement in the lives of African Americans requires inspection and analysis of gender and sexuality related intragroup variation and diversity. I situate this discussion primarily within a post-civil rights ideological revolution related to the European American “gaze,” multiculturalism, and European American emotional ambivalence toward the Black body. It is proposed that Collins's analysis of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality among African Americans occurs within an American context that reciprocally impacts African American intragroup dynamics.     

Critical Diversity and Departmental Rankings in Sociology

This paper examines whether racial and gender diversity are related to the rankings of sociology programs at research universities. It uses data from the 2011 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Rankings of U.S. Research Universities to examine the competing expectations of the “critical diversity perspective” and the “diversity as process-loss” perspective. The results are counter to the expectations of the diversity as process-loss perspective, which predicts that diversity (and efforts to achieve it) are harmful to organizations. The results are fully consistent with the critical diversity as value-in-diversity perspective, which predicts that as organizations become more diverse, they benefit relative to their competitors. The results show that, net of research rankings, 1995 rankings, faculty publication rates, visibility of faculty publications, percentage of faculty with grants, scholarly awards, program size, region, and whether the institution is public or private, diversity is positively associated with departmental rankings of sociology programs in research universities. The implications of these findings for diversity in sociology are discussed.     

THE STATE STREET MILE: AGE AND GENDER DIFFERENCES IN COMPETITION AVERSION IN THE FIELD

Gender differences in “competitiveness,” previously documented in laboratory experiments, are hypothesized to play a role in a wide array of economic outcomes. This paper provides evidence of competition aversion in a natural setting somewhere between the simplicity of a laboratory experiment and the full complexity and ambiguity of a labor market. The “State Street Mile” race offers both male and female participants a choice between two different levels of competition. Large, systematic age and gender differences are observed in the relationship between true ability and the decision to enter the more competitive race. Overall, qualified women and older runners are far less likely than qualified young men to enter a competitive race with prizes. However, the fastest young women unanimously enter the competitive race. Therefore, while we confirm age and gender differences in competitiveness in our field setting, the economic consequences to capable young women are rather small. (JEL J1, J7, M5)     

Sex Matters

Feminists increasingly recognize that “sex,” as a reference to embodied male–female difference, is no less socially constructed than “gender.” Like all signifiers, the meaning of these terms is produced through contingent and particular historical processes; yet histories of “how sex was made” are rare. This essay draws on extensive, multidisciplinary research – focused through a lens of early (archaic) state making – to render a partial and provisional genealogy of sex. The schematic history begins with early human social formations and the “agricultural revolution” that marked a shift from food gathering to food producing. It then reviews the defining characteristics – in particular, the invention of writing – and attendant inequalities of early/archaic state-formation (urbanization; the “rise of civilization”). The centralization of Greek city-states has particular, indeed profound, relevance for what is conventionally called the “western tradition.” The essay then directs attention to the Athenian polis, not only because it exemplifies features of early states, but because modern interpretations of classical texts and Athenian practices uniquely shaped European political theory/practice; in particular, by naturalizing hierarchies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, class and national “difference.”     

The “male” privilege of White women,the “White” privilege of Black women,and vulnerability to violence: an intersectional analysis of Peace Corps workers in host countries

This article is an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nationality in development work. Using interview, document, and observational data, I situate this inquiry in the context of US women’s work in the Peace Corps, an organization within a field marked by colonialism. I find that White women and women of color have similar and yet instructively different experiences of their gendered identities in field sites, because race and gender differently affect their identities and relative privilege abroad. Specifically, White women volunteers are often afforded some degree of “male” privilege because of their race (though their race may render them vulnerable to sexual violence), while some volunteers of color are afforded a degree of “White” privilege because of their nationality (although their race may also render them vulnerable to violence). However, because the Peace Corps does not challenge conventional race and gender privileges, it lacks the organizational orientation and capacity to effectively address safety and assault among its women volunteers.     

Class, Culture and Empire: E. P. Thompson and the Making of Social History

In this article, the author asks: How has the legacy of E.P. Thompson helped shape the emergence of Social History in the United States? How have ideas about race, gender and empire, largely absent from Thompson’s work, been incorporated in writing on labor, immigration, and American exceptionalism? Is it now possible to synthesize race, class, and gender? Or, have histories based on class analysis so elided race and gender that such grafting has been foreclosed? With a bit of gossip here, a gesture to historiography there, and as little charm as possible, the author wonders: Is there any justice for “the Subaltern” in this profession? Or, is it just another “Organization Man” gone West?     

The Inseparability of “Career” and “Personal” Counseling

In this article it is argued that “career” and “personal” counseling should not be viewed as different types of counseling because: (a) the holistic philosophy of counseling emphasizes helping “whole” persons whose lives contain many important and meaningful roles; (b) recent research on the implications of gender and race for career development further demonstrates the inseparability of our career and “personal” lives; and (c) there are numerous commonalities in the “career” and “personal” counseling process.     

LEAVING IN DROVES: Exit Chains in Network Attrition

The article examines the emergence of “exit chains”—temporal clusters in attrition, which are expected but rarely documented. Studying attrition in an industry peer network (IPN), we compare the three modes of leaving: as an initial exit in a chain (“leader”), a subsequent exit in a chain (“follower”), and a stand‐alone exit (“loner”). Combining regression and simulation techniques, the analysis affirms the role interdependence between leader and followers, whose rationales for leaving are distinct but complementary, one internal based on exchange imbalances, the other external based on exposure to peer influence. Exit chains are depicted as a by‐product of social embeddedness and the inherently high costs of relationship termination.     

The Medicalization of Deviance as an Interactive Achievement: The Construction of Compulsive Gambling

This article joins two lines of research from distinct areas in sociology to illuminate the mechanisms through which the meaning of “compulsive gambling” and what it means to be “a compulsive gambler” are cooperatively constructed in interaction at meetings of the fellowship group Gamblers Anonymous (GA). Combining Conrad's work on the medicalization of deviance with a social psychological focus on support group interaction, I demonstrate how individuals' experiences and identities come to be imbued with a medical vocabulary through the homogenization of the initial diversity among members. This analysis contributes to conceptualizations of the medicalization of deviance as well as to interactionist interests in the social construction of reality.     

Race, Gender, and the Black Women's Standpoint

Hill Collins (1997, 1998, 2000) argues that because of their position within the intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, and class, black women as a group possess a “unique angle of vision” on the social world. Rooted in the everyday experiences of black women, the “black women’s standpoint” is marked by an intersectional understanding of oppression and a “legacy of struggle” against such oppression. In this article, I employ quantitative analyses of data from the National Survey of Black Americans (1992) and the National Black Feminist Study (2004–2005) to investigate the black women’s standpoint. I ask: “Do black women as a group tend toward the black women’s standpoint that Hill Collins describes?” and “Do black women embrace this perspective more than black men?” Results from numerous χ² and logistic regression analyses suggest that, within the black community, gender is not a significant predictor of the standpoint that Hill Collins describes, with black men and black women being equally likely to embrace many of the core ideas associated with the black women’s standpoint. I conclude by discussing the implications of this finding for gender and race‐based standpoint theory.     

Repelling the “Rutter”: Social Differentiation Among Rural Teenagers

This paper examines low‐income white rural teenagers' management of race and class‐based inequality. It analyzes how these teenagers constructed boundaries to distinguish themselves from outsiders, but also to distinguish themselves from the local abject category of “rutter.” The findings reveal hidden interconnections between race and class in interactional practice, and highlight local processes of differentiation through which actors attempt to deflect stigma and attain credibility. The paper discusses how interactional mechanisms such as “internal othering” and “stigma‐theory” bolster race and class credibility, but reproduce inequality.     

Contending masculinities: the gendered (re) negotiation of colonial hierarchy in the United Nations debates on decolonization

The emergence of legal decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, as evidenced by the 1960 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, is often understood through the lens of race and the disruption of racial hierarchy. If we take seriously the transnational feminist contention that the colonial racial order was also gendered, however, how might this perspective shift our understanding of decolonization? In this article, I explore the debates on decolonization that take place in the UN General Assembly from 1946–1960 that lead to the 1960 Declaration from a transnational feminist perspective to answer this question. Specifically, I use comparative historical and discourse methods of analysis to explore how colonialists and anti-colonialists negotiate the onset of legal decolonization, focusing especially on how colonialist hierarchies of race, culture, and gender are addressed in these debates. I argue that, on the one hand, colonialists rely on a paternalist masculinity to legitimate their rule (i.e., our dependencies require our rule the way a child requires a father). In response, anti-colonialists reply with a resistance masculinity (i.e., “colonialism is emasculating;” “decolonization is necessary for a return of masculine dignity”). I argue that decolonization in the United Nations transpires via contentions among differentially racialized masculinities. Ultimately, a transnational feminist perspective that centers the intersection of race and gender offers a richer analysis than a perspective that examines race alone.