“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.     

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.     

Muddying the Waters Does Not Have to Entail Erosion: Ecological Feminist Concerns with Purity

Ecofeminists call attention to the associations that have been made between woman and nature, which can operate as a source of both subjugation and resistance, exploitation, and inspiration. This paper expands upon feminist critiques of purity by phrasing these concerns in an ecological feminist perspective. This theoretical exercise of problematizing the ideal of purity sheds light upon the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression. Preservationist work has tended to employ the logic of purity by focusing on protection of the purity of the wild regions of the earth from the polluting forces of humanity. However, such approaches retain the troublesome nature/culture dualism. The author illustrates how attempts to fragment and radically separate people from the environment can prove to be highly dangerous. She connects the theoretical resistance to purity to the important activist work that is being done to expose environmental racism. Finally, she discusses how muddying the waters and resisting the logic of purity can offer a promising approach to pressing problems revolving around the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression.     

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.     

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.     

The development of a capacity for concern in antisocial children: Winnicott's concept of human relatedness

Winnicott's refreshing view of clinical practice includes the unique notion that delinquency is a sign of hope. Several of Winnicott's interpersonal concepts fit together to develop this thought: holding environment, capacity for concern, the use of the object, and hate in the counter transference. In this paper these four concepts are described and the case of a ten-year-old antisocial youngster is used to illustrate Winnicott's thinking and tie some of his illusive ideas into a difficult but familiar kind of practice situation. The therapeutic approach used was a mixture of case management and play therapy. What is different however is the way in which the therapist interpreted the youngster's behavior and stimulated his rich fantasy life.     

The Use of Coercion in the Treatment of Incarcerated Juveniles Adjudicated on Sexual Offenses: Consequences and Implications

Since the inception of specialized treatment for juveniles accused of and adjudicated on sexual offenses (JASOs), denial has been an organizing principle. Most clinicians believe that breaking through denial is a necessary prerequisite for successful treatment. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to support this claim. Further, when admitting to one's sexually offensive behavior in treatment becomes paramount, the risk that other therapeutic issues are missed or ignored increases. This article calls attention to the dangers of coercion, in its varied forms, when attempting to get youth to take responsibility for their sexually offensive behavior. Based on interviews with 40 incarcerated JASOs, the author suggests that using presumptive realities as an organizing principle rather than denial, helps to focus treatment providers on their role in the therapeutic process. In using presumptive realities the JASO's story or interpretation of the abuse event is considered therapeutically relevant and reflective of the context in which treatment occurs.     

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.     

A Culturally Salient Polish Emotion: Przykro ['Pshickro]

The author analyzes, on the basis of naturally occurring examples, the Polish word przykro, which, she argues, plays an important role in Polish emotion talk. She compares and contrasts this word with its closest English counterparts, such as hurt, offended, sorry, and sad, and she shows how each of these English words differs in meaning from the Polish key word przykro. To be able to show, clearly and precisely, what these differences are, she relies on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), based on a set of empirically established lexical and grammatical universals. In doing so, she seeks to demonstrate the explanatory power of the proposed methodological framework (the NSM semantic theory). At the same time the author shows how language-specific lexical categories such as the Polish word przykro are linked with a culture's core values. She also shows the cultural implications of the lexical category hurt in Anglo culture, and discusses the cultural implications of the absence of a word like przykro in English, and of a word like hurt in Polish.     

Theory at risk: Accounting for the excellence movement

Amidst widespread concern about educational crisis and the need for reform, the current excellence movement places a pronounced emphasis on rigor, standards, and a core curriculum of basic studies. At issue here is whether major macro-the-oretical perspectives can account for the emergence of this movement. Functional and Marxian theories do not meet this challenge well, especially insofar as they posit a tight, rational linkage between school and economy and downplay the institutional autonomy of the educational system. A status conflict approach, emphasizing middle class mobilization, offers greater insight, though it must be complemented with a recognition of constraints imposed by capitalist organization and the institutionalization of educational myths.     

Promoting Justice in the Delivery of Services to Juvenile Delinquents: The Ecosystemic Natural Wrap-Around Model

Caught between their child and doing the right thing, families of chronic juvenile delinquents often experience a series of injustices in the name of justice. Attempts by the system to correct the delinquency problem often result in the imposition of values and beliefs that negate the family's values, experiences and meanings of their child's behavior. The Ecosystemic Natural Wrap-around (E.N.W.) model attempts to respectfully account for the many influences that maintain problematic interactions, both internal and external, in the nuclear family of chronic juvenile delinquents. The model focuses on a variety of interventions at different levels and contexts, building on the strengths of the family, using the extended family and fictive kin networks, and clarifying the meanings associated with problematic behavior for the multiple players. The model proposed is an integrative theoretical approach, emphasizing systems theory and constructivism.     

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.     

Governmental response to juvenile fruit machine gambling in the U.K: Where do we go from here?

The U.K. Gaming Act of 1968 prohibits young people under the age of eighteen years from all commercial gambling except on slot machines, commonly known as fruit machines and officially known as amusements with prizes. The U.K. Government responded to growing public concern, that some children are becoming addicted to this form of gambling and committing crime to fund their play, by directing the Home Office to undertake its own investigation. The researchers found no evidence of an association between the playing of amusement machines, dependency and delinquency. The Home Office study is critically assessed both on its own merit and in the light of research undertaken before and since. Suggestions are made for future sociological research initiatives.The author would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this work through a Research Studentship Grant. The author would also like to thank David Dunkerley and Mark Griffiths for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

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.     

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.     

When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter

Judith Butler's analysis of corporeal matters offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that language and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of writing with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of writing to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.     

Implementation of the Walrasian correspondence without continuous,convex, and ordered preferences

This paper consideres the problem of designing better mechanisms whose Nash allocations coincide with constrained Walrasian allocations for non-neoclassical economies under the minimal possible assumptions. We show that no assumprions on preferences are needed for feasible and continuous implementation of the constrained Walraisan correspondence. Further, under the monotonicity assumption, we present a mechanism that is completely feasible and continuous. Hence, no continuity and convexity assumptions on preferences are required, and preferences may be nontotal or nontransitive. Thus, this paper gives a somewhat positive answer to the question raised in the literature by showing that, even for non-neoclassical economies, there are incentive-compatible, privacy preserving, and well-behaved mechanisms which yield Pareto-efficient and individually rational allocations at Nash equilibria.I wish to thank J. S. Chipman, J. Jordan, M. Richter, H. Weinberger, the editor, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. I am particularly thankful to L. Hurwicz who stimulated my interest in this problem and provided detailed comments and suggestions.     

Compulsive gambling and the medical model

The medical model as a conceptual and operative approach to compulsive gambling is discussed. The terms medical model and disease are defined and the practical implications of their application to compulsive gambling are explored. Special attention is given to the addictive disease concept. Finally, a variety of objections to the medical model are described, but it is concluded that the many individual and social advantages of the medical model make it the preferred conceptualization at our present state of knowledge.     

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.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.