Opioid bills stalled after GOP clears them in Senate

Neither S. 2680 nor H.R. 6, the two big opioid bills that are being crafted into one package under the leadership of Sen. Lamar Alexander (R‐Tennessee), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, have come before the full Senate yet. Despite the fact that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R‐Kentucky) called them a “priority” last month (see ADAW, Aug. 27), and got his party to clear Senator Alexander's package on Aug. 28, he has not yet scheduled a vote.     

Enchanted companionship of Korean Catholic youth amid compressed individualization

Korean youth are confronted with “existential vulnerability” in an uncertain labor market. “Compressed individualization” reflects a high-risk society in Korea's socio-economic context and acts as the social backdrop for the “privatization of religion.” Despite de-religionization or the unchurching climate, what are the peculiar features of Korean Catholic youth who are actively participating in a church group? The authors selected five Catholic youth groups and conducted in-depth interviews with 18 of their members. Highly religious young Catholics demonstrate coping with existential insecurity amid compressed individualization via “enchanted companionship” experienced through prayer, sharing, or service. Despite differences in communal culture between groups, the peculiar features of their enchanted companionship include holistic healing, reciprocal transcendence, and solidarity. Amid the youth's struggles to find their way toward the fullness of life, these communities offer them a “free and gratuitous haven” distinct from secular ties in the utilitarian and disenchanted world. They can also voluntarily discover the significance of life through their activities, reflections, and missions. In sum, this study explains how religiosity is formed through a socio-existential vulnerability in youth's lived religion at a micro-level analysis, and signifies enchanted companionship as a key mechanism counteracting the waves of the secular world.     

Durkheim and The Structure of Social Action*

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

Ritual Power in Interaction*

Research (by a self-styled participant observer) into two fashions of persons—nurses and punks—lends unexpected significance to the ritual “frame” as this appears in Erving Goffman's thought. A new concept that was only implicit in Goffman's ritual frame is demanded by the research experiences. This is “ritual power.” Ritual power, especially when it is strong, is like “presence” or “possession”, and it may well exert a major claim on interactants' consciousnesses (whether the interactants are displaying it or appreciating it). Of course, it must follow that verbal forms which try to define ritual power will do so the more powerfully the more they arrest the reader's attention. So it may not be a good idea to use sociological rhetoric of any sort to suggest that punks and nurses are exemplary referents of “ritual power”, but this last possibility is only latent in what follows.     

Farm Women and the Empowerment Potential in Value‐Added Agriculture

While the number of women in farming has risen in the United States, less clear is whether increasing participation in agriculture translates into empowerment. Are invisibility and disempowerment lingering expressions of farm women's experience? Using qualitative data drawn from 32 interviews with Michigan value‐added farmers, we examine the extent to which women have been able to experience empowerment, and the ways in which value‐added agriculture specifically fosters an empowering context. We adopt a conceptualization of empowerment from the development scholarship in order to establish a baseline for scrutiny, viewing empowerment as a multidimensional process constituting the “power to” realize one's goals, the opportunity to exercise “power with” others, and the ability to find and nurture “power within” the self. Our findings indicate that value‐added agriculture provides a unique context for women's empowerment. At the same time, the extent to which value added‐agriculture constitutes a venue for women's empowerment is complex, is multifaceted, and requires constant negotiation. It can be organized and performed in such a way as to subvert the empowerment process by confining women to specific social locations that may reproduce oppressive structures.     

Telling Others How You Live—Refining Goffman's Stigma Theory Through an Analysis of Housing Strugglers in a Homeowner Nation

This article revisits Goffman's stigma theory from the perspective of housing studies. We elaborate on Goffman's approach by exploring how housing tenure can work as a proxy for moral character. We interviewed twenty‐seven people who are excluded from access to homeownership in two cities in Norway, which is a “homeowner nation.” These individuals are unable to enter the dominant “homeowner class” for different reasons, including drug‐dependency, mental illness, refugee background, low socioeconomic status; thus, they must access housing through other tenures; private renting or social housing. To many of them, housing becomes a stigma, in Goffman terms, an “undesired differentness.” Social housing is known to carry stigma in Norway. It was thus a paradox, that those with the softest differentness—private rental—were most likely to practice (Goffman:) “information control” over their housing situation. Goffman's theoretical apparatus, and his distinction between the discreditable and the discredited in particular, helped us make this paradox comprehensible. Through this analysis, refinements to Goffman's theory were discovered. We suggest that “multiple stigmas,” which was not seen clearly by Goffman himself, should be a key notion in stigma studies. We use this notion to distinguish between possible sub‐types to the discredited‐discreditable distinction.     

The Dramaturgical Model of Behavior: Its Strengths and Weaknesses*

By means of the dramaturgical model we freshly illuminate social behavior as role-like “performances” in which persons manage the impressions that others get of them. This impression management involves the concealment of data in a “dramatic” struggle with those others who wish to penetrate one's “mask.” But the chief limitations of the dramaturgical model are that it excites the invalid inferences that offstage “roles” are more like stage actors' roles than they really are, and that the person is nothing but these “roles.” The differences between onstage and offstage behavior are kept in view when the metaphorical concept of “role playing” is re-connected to its source in role playing onstage. Through an analysis of theatre and the concepts of appearance and time we conclude that while we must appear to others in a “role-like” way offstage in order to be ourselves, we are nevertheless involved in world-time offstage in a way that fundamentally distinguishes our “role-playing” from an actor's role playing. We are our “roles”, but not just our “roles.”     

Fashion as consumer entrepreneurship: Emergent risk culture,social network markets,and the launch of Vogue in China

China has a reputation as an economy based on utility: the large‐scale manufacture of low‐priced goods. But useful values like functionality, fitness for purpose and efficiency are only part of the story. More important are what Veblen called “honorific” values, arguably the driving force of development, change and value in any economy. To understand the Chinese economy therefore, it is not sufficient to point to its utilitarian aspect. Honorific status‐competition is a more fundamental driver than utilitarian cost‐competition. We argue that “social network markets” are the expression of these honorific values, relationships and connections that structure and coordinate individual choices. This paper explores how such markets are developing in China in the area of fashion and fashion media. These, we argue, are an expression of “risk culture” for high‐end entrepreneurial consumers and producers alike, providing a stimulus to dynamic innovation in the arena of personal taste and comportment, as part of an international cultural system based on constant change. We examine the launch of Vogue China in 2005, and China's reception as a fashion player among the international editions of Vogue, as an expression of a “decisive moment” in the integration of China into an international social network market based on honorific values.     

“I” and Self-Consciousness in the Japanese Language and in Sociology

Abstract It is often said that the Japanese lack the firm consciousness of “self” namely, they yield to groups and are absorbed in an anonymous state. Some ascribe this to the Japanese language, in which the first and the second person are expressed by various pronouns (or, in many cases, are even omitted) in accordance with the relationships between persons. By contrast the Westerner's “I,” which is usually the only pronoun for the first-person, is rarely omitted. They conclude from this that the Japanese individual does not possess as clearly defined a conception of “self” as does the Westerner. Underlying this issue are the fundamental, interwoven questions of language and self-consciousness: does “self” really exist, and does the analysis of the I in language pertain to the first question? This paper discusses these questions by considering Wittgenstein's argument that “I” does not refer to self-consciousness: rather, “self” is a metaphysical reification of “I.” These problems concern sociology, in which the “subject” of action has been the focal point of methodological arguments. I will show that Meadian interactionism and critical theory are deeply rooted in the metaphysical, subjectivist understanding of “I,” while ethnomethodology offers a perspective which overcomes both subjectivism and objectivism for studying communication.     

Separation Crises in Over-Attached Families

Families are described as “over-attached” whose members respond anxiously to the otherwise normal unfolding of separation-individuation processes and in the absence of past traumatic separations. It is observed that “anxious attachment” occurs with over-availability just as with under-availability of attachment figures and that attachment is an intra-familial process as well as a dyadic one. A reformulation of Bowlby's attachment theory is required in order to encompass this systemic perspective, and to allow also for the integration of intrapsychic and extrapsychic process. Bowlby's control systems model need not stand in opposition to either systemic or psychoanalytic thinking.     

Keep On Keepin' On—Alienation and Trauma Commentary on Ruth Fallenbaum's Paper

Ruth Fallenbaum's “The Injured Worker” focuses on something that not only the quotidian routine but also the inward focus of psychoanalysis inclines us to lose sight of: that in capitalism our search for empowerment ultimately disempowers us. Alienation is the psychology of class. It shows up as demoralization, shame, and inflamed psychesomas. It is a condition of institutionalized sadism that makes people “go postal.” “The Injured Worker” shows what we analysts must do when faced with the permanent trauma of alienation: patiently bear witness to our patients' tellings and retellings and, sometimes, get our hands dirty.     

SIGN,SYMBOL, AND METALANGUAGE: AGAINST THE INTEGRATION OF SEMIOTICS AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

Dean MacCannell's proposal for a “rapprochement” between symbolic interaction-ism and semiotics, in which the “generality” of symbolic interactionism's conception the sign is “raised” to that of semiotics, is examined. By turning exclusively to Saussurian semiotics, MacCannell does not adequately reflect the distinction between “natural” and “arbitrary” representation in Peirce's semiosis that is the most fruitful link with Mead's symbolic interactionism. Consequently, MacCannell's argument at the level of terminology is flawed. Rather than merging, the perspectives might benefit from a radical rethinking of representation. This would involve preserving the distinction between the “natural” and “arbitrary,” while at the same time recognizing that in mass society “arbitrary” representation has become a kind of “second-order” (Barthes) indexical metalanguage of membership within which symbolic interaction may occur. As Baudrillard claims, “commutation of signs” has replaced “interaction of symbols,” yet strains against an unfulfilled symbolic demand. Efforts should be directed at generating a theory of representation capable of addressing the tension that produces this symbolic demand.     

WHAT IF FAMILY THERAPY WERE A KIND OF PSYCHOTHERAPY? A READING OF THE HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOTHERAPY AND BEHAVIOR CHANGE*

Editor's Note. This piece by Grunebaum is not an “original article,” although his approach to presenting Garfield and Bergin's Handbook to a family therapy audience is certainly original; it does not meet the usual requirements as apiece for the “Connections” section of the Journal, although it certainly does forge such connections with the mental health world beyond family therapy; and it is not a typical “book review,” and thus, is appropriately described in its subtitle as a “reading,” rather than a review. It is a most creative demonstration of the fact that family therapists can learn a good deal of practical value from their colleagues who are “outside” our field.     

Toward A Renewed Sociological Jurisprudence: From Roscoe Pound to Herbert Blumer and Beyond

This article, based on the Distinguished Lecture presented on August 21, 2001, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Anaheim, California, proposes a synthesis of Herbert Blumer's macrosociological perspective on the race question with Roscoe Pound's philosophy and science of law (i.e., his so‐called sociological jurisprudence), Joseph Tussman's and Jacobus tenBroek's juridical methodology, and Philip Selznick's sociology of responsive law. The compound so produced will help to establish a foundation for a praxiological sociology of American constitutional law. The article focuses on the problem of legislative‐made “classifications” and their relations to the legitimate public purposes entailed in the enactment of statutes, laws, and decrees. Such classifications become problematic when they are said to be “underinclusive,” “over‐inclusive,” or both in seeking to effect their aims. Strategic research sites for this issue are racial and ethnic classifications that single out one or a limited cluster of racial or ethnic groups for special benefits (“affirmative action”) or restitution (“reparations”). Calling for a reinvigoration of Pound's pragmatic approach to sociological jurisprudence, I show how Blumer's analysis of the “color line”—when seen in relation to the original intent of the makers of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth post‐Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, using Tussman's and tenBroek's showing of how such categorizations might be both methodically evaluated and applied to the challenged classifications—provides grounds for reconsidering whether the latter are instances of “reverse discrimination” and, hence, violations of the constitutional requirement of “equal protection of the law.” The science of law is a science of social engineering having to do with that part of the whole field which may be achieved by the ordering of human relations through the action of politically organized society. —Roscoe Pound, Justice According to Law We did not hold it necessary to wait for nature to put a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and we shall not much longer hold it necessary to wait for nature to dig the legal canals that will give security to neglected human interests which clamor for recognition and protection. —Roscoe Pound, “Juristic Problems of National Progress”     

Love the Sin—Pedagogy,Pupils, and Psychology Commentary on Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pelligrini

This article examines the author's reactions to teaching Janet Jakobsen's and Ann Pellegini's Love the Sin in a course titled “Contemporary Issues in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies” at Dartmouth College. He examines not only the students' reactions and the points at which they can or cannot grasp the book's arguments, but also his own responses to their reactions. At the center of the essay is his realization that the students, having been brought up in a liberal mode of “tolerance,” have little access to Jakobsen and Pellegrini's social or political concept of “sexual freedom”; and, while they completely eschew state regulation of sexuality, they do not view it as an essential human right, but rather as a private matter.     

Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption,Racial Reparation,and Racial Transitional Objects

Transnational adoption involves the intersection of two powerful origin myths—the return to mother and to motherland. In this case history of a Korean transnational adoptee, Mina, problems relating to Asian immigration, assimilation, and racialization are central to her psychic predicaments. Mina mourns the loss of Korea and her Korean birth mother as a profoundly intrasubjective and unconscious affair. Her losses trigger a series of psychical responses that reconfigure Freud's notions of melancholia not as pathological but an everyday (racial) structure of feeling and Klein's theories of good and bad objects as good and bad racialized objects, as good and bad racialized mothers. Mina's case also draws attention to the analyst as a raced subject. The “public” fact of the analyst's and the patient's shared racial difference, and the “public” nature of the analyst's pregnancy during the course of the patient's treatment, constitutes the analyst, to reformulate Winnicott, as a “racial transitional object” for Mina. As such, Mina “uses” the analyst to manage her envy and to transition into a reparative position for race, one allowing her to create space in her psyche for two “good-enough” mothers-the Korean birth mother as well as the white adoptive mother.     

The Voice of the Dead: Commentary on Cornelia St. John's Paper

This commentary celebrates the evocativeness and acuity of Cornelia St. John's case study, while offering a slightly elaborated rereading. This rereading has a few major elements. First, the fragmentation of language enacted in the patient's stutter does indeed function as a “rupture” in the fabric of consciousness, but this is not as categorically gendered as St. John seems to suggest. Second the case study is framed by a melancholia that is both classical and contemporary in reflecting a state of “being in love with loss” that seems to be sweeping the culture. Third, in this particular case the melancholy is deeply abjected, having its origins in the overwhelming power of the mother's depression, a state that envelops the patient and also touches off fantasies of melancholic dissolution in his analyst. Finally, the relatively muted consideration of the patient's cultural “foreignness” is discussed.     

A Luta Kontinua (The Struggle Continues)

This article examines how East Timorese women's contributions to the resistance against the twenty-four-year Indonesian occupation (“the Resistance”) have been marginalized within the veteran's valorization scheme (veterans' scheme) established in the post-conflict period. Drawing on interviews with politicians, veterans and members of women's organizations, we show that although women played significant roles within the Armed, Clandestine and Diplomatic fronts, for the most part they have not been recognized as veterans within the veterans' scheme. Instead, the scheme has reinforced perceptions of women's roles as wives, mothers, homemakers and widows, rather than as political actors, suggesting that the return to “peace” in Timor-Leste has been accompanied by the strengthening of patriarchal traditions and the expectation that women return to “traditional” roles. We argue that the failure to recognize women as veterans is problematic both for East Timorese women and society as a whole. It represents a lost opportunity to recognize women's agency and potentially to improve their social status in society. It also narrows the way in which the independence struggle is remembered and represented and further promotes a culture of “militarized masculinity” that elevates and rewards men who show the capacity to use violence.