Unmasking Racism: Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Other

We explore Halloween as a uniquely constructive space for engaging racial concepts and identities, particularly through ritual costuming. Data were collected using 663 participant observation journals from college students across the U.S. During Halloween, many individuals actively engage the racial other in costuming across racial/ethnic lines. Although some recognize the significance of racial stereotyping in costuming, it is often dismissed as being part of the holiday's social context. We explore the costumes worn, as well as responses to cross-racial costuming, analyzing how “playing” with racialized concepts and making light of them in the “safe” context of Halloween allows students to trivialize and reproduce racial stereotypes while supporting the racial hierarchy. We argue that unlike traditional “rituals of rebellion,” wherein subjugated groups temporarily assume powerful roles, whites contemporarily engage Halloween as a sort of “ritual of rebellion” in response to the seemingly restrictive social context of the post-Civil Rights era, and in a way that ultimately reinforces white dominance.

Civil Society on Global Governance: Facing Up to Divergent Analysis, Strategy, and Tactics

This paper considers three different conceptualizations – three politico-ideological perspectives within civil society – on global-scale economics and geopolitics. The standpoints can be termed “Global justice movements,” “Third World nationalism,” and the “Post-Washington Consensus.” These three perspectives stand in contrast to the fusion of neoliberal economics and neoconservative politics that dominates the contemporary world. The three approaches sometimes converge, but more often than not they are in conflict; as are the civil society institutions that cohere to the three different political ideologies. From the three different analyses flow different strategies, concrete campaigning tactics, and varying choices of allies. The World Social Forum provides hints of a potentially unifying approach within the global justice movements based upon the practical themes of “decommodification” and “deglobalization” (of capital). It is, however, only by facing up to the ideological divergences that the global justice movement can enhance its presence.

The Application of Co-modality in Greece: a Critical Appraisal of Progress in the Development of Co-modal Freight Centres and Logistics Services

This paper discusses the situation in Greece as regards the introduction of co-modal transport services. It starts with basic definitions of “co-modality” and what it means for Greece. It then presents the results of a demand data collection and analysis exercise which resulted in the first ever estimates of the “potential” for road/rail co-modal transport in Greece today and in 2015. Based on these forecasts it seems that at least for two thickly populated areas of the country (i.e. Athens and Thessaloniki) this demand can be as high as 40% of the total freight flows. The paper then goes on to examine the means by which the responsible authorities can “induce” co-modal services in the country. It does this by examining the policies necessary, the infrastructure (both hard and “soft”), the necessary actions and incentives for the development of a “co-modal” market, and the necessary training––education actions for human resource development. The overall conclusion is that unless specific actions are taken on behalf of the government (such as those mentioned in the paper) the “land” based co-modal transport has no future in Greece.

Interdisciplinary foundations of urban ecology

Researchers have identified urban ecology as a new field integrating social and ecological science. Critics have portrayed the field as under-theorized with negative implications for research and urban environmental planning. Unprecedented urbanization and historical bias against research integrating social and ecological systems are identified as driving this deficit. Researchers have called for new integrative approaches to address this issue. In response, this paper applies ecology’s analytic framework of “patch dynamics”, Kuhn’s concept of “normal science” and Mazoyer and Roudart’s “evolutionary series” to demographic data and historical texts to perform an analysis of interdisciplinary contributions to theory applicable in the field of urban ecology. The subsequent exploration reveals a rich history of interdisciplinary inquiry along the nature/society divide. The paper concludes that these “largely ignored” contributions offer urban ecology the opportunity to claim much broader depth as a field gaining access to precedents and innovations accomplished during the field’s early theoretical development. Drawing upon this history, a framework for ecological urban development is suggested to inform and assist contemporary research in urban ecology and planning.

Coping with Conflict,Confronting Resistance: Fieldwork Emotions and Identity Management in a South Korean Evangelical Community

Methodological difficulties attendant to ethnographic fieldwork—such as gaining access, maintaining fieldwork relations, objectivity, and fieldwork stresses—are intensified for researchers working with “absolutist” religious group, groups that hold an exclusivist or totalistic definition of truth. Based on my fieldwork in a conservative South Korean evangelical community, I explore in this article two central and related methodological dilemmas pertaining to studying absolutist religious groups: identity negotiation and emotional management during fieldwork. Writing from my complex location as a feminist and a cultural/religious insider/outsider in relation to the South Korean evangelical community, I explore in particular the challenges posed by identity/role management in the field and its emotional dimensions, including the issue of the researcher’s power and vulnerability, the quandary of “conformity,” and the emotional costs of self-repression arising from the researcher’s fundamental value conflicts with the group. I conclude with a reflection on the implications of these experiences for ethnographic methodology, most centrally, how we manage our emotional responses in the field, including “inappropriate” ones, and how we can relate them to the research process.

All the News that’s Fat to Print: The American “Obesity Epidemic” and the Media

In the last twenty years scientific, medical, and public health interest in obesity has skyrocketed. Increasingly the term “epidemic” is being used in the media, medical journals, and public health policy literature to describe the current prevalence of fatness in the U.S. Using social scientific literature on epidemics, social problems, and feminist theories of the body, this paper traces the historical emergence of the “obesity epidemic” through an analysis of 751 articles on obesity published in The New York Times between 1990 and 2001. Through the identification and analysis of three discursive pairings I argue that the “obesity epidemic” is a part of a new breed of what I call “post-modern epidemics,” epidemics in which unevenly medicalized phenomena lacking a clear pathological basis get cast in the language and moral panic of “traditional” epidemics. I show how this moral panic together with the location of the problem within the individual precludes a more macro level approach to health and health care delivery at a time when health care services are being dismantled or severely cut back.

The Government–Third Sector Interface in Québec

In this paper, the authors analyze different forms of interface between the government and third sector organizations in Québec. In order to do so, they studied relationships in eight different fields of activity: homeless youth services, housing for intellectually deficient people, support organizations for natural caregivers, community leisure centers, community housing for the elderly, daycare centers, social economy organizations for domestic assistance, and services specializing in employment for handicapped people. Following a review of international literature on the relationship between the government and the third sector, the paper analyzes these relationships on the basis of the typology developed by Jennifer M. Coston, which is adapted to the Québécois context. In the eight activity sectors studied, the authors found the presence of four different types of interface between the government and the third sector: “subcontracting,” “coexistence,” “supplementarity,” and “co-construction” relationships.

“Family-Friendly” Fringe Benefits and the Gender Wage Gap

Evidence suggests a large portion of the gender wage gap is explained by gender occupational segregation. A common hypothesis is that gender differences in preferences or abilities explain this segregation; women may prefer jobs that provide more “family-friendly” fringe benefits. Much of the research provides no direct evidence on gender differences in access to fringe benefits, nor how provision affects wages. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we find that women are more likely to receive family-friendly benefits, but not other types of fringe benefits. We find no evidence that the differences in fringe benefits explain the gender wage gap.

In Vino Pecunia? The Association Between Beverage-Specific Drinking Behavior and Wages

The positive association between moderate alcohol consumption and wages is well documented in the economic literature. Positive health effects as well as networking mechanisms serve as explanations for the “alcohol–income puzzle.” Using individual-based microdata from the SOEP for 2006, we confirm that this relationship exists for Germany as well. More importantly, we shed light on the alcohol–income puzzle by analyzing, for the first time, the association between beverage-specific drinking behavior and wages. In our analysis, we disentangle the general wage effect of drinking into diverse effects for different types of drinkers. Mincerian estimates reveal significant and positive relationships between wine drinkers and wages as well as between multiple beverage drinkers and wages. When splitting the sample into age groups, the “drinking gain” disappears for employees under the age of 35 and increases in size and significance for higher age groups. We also find a “beer gain” for the oldest age group and male residents of rural areas as well as a “cocktail gain” for residents of urban areas. Several explanations for our empirical results are discussed in view of the likelihood that the alcohol–income puzzle is a multicausal phenomenon.

At Yesenia’s House…

This paper explores the multiple expressions of Central American immigrant Pentecostalism in the Pico Union district of Los Angeles. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in three temples and informal conversations with over 30 active Pentecostals, this paper shows that Central American immigrant Pentecostals tend to congregate on the basis of “congregational homophily,” or shared social and cultural characteristics, especially in terms of age, marital status, presence of infirmities or ailments, and national/regional origin. This paper also explores the ways in which Central American immigrant Pentecostals tailor their religious practices to reflect their “congregational homophily” through the differential inclusion/exclusion of practices such as healing, “roommating,” and formal and informal discussions of shared histories. By focusing on “congregational homophily” and the active constructions and reconstructions of Central American immigrant Pentecostalism, we gain more insight into the ways some Central American immigrants negotiate their lives and experiences in the increasingly fettered social, cultural, and political topography of contemporary Los Angeles.

“A New Sort of ‘Salvation Army’”: Historical Perspectives on the Confluence of Psychoanalysis and Social Work

No profession in the United States has a broader perspective on human needs than social work. Bold but also functional, social work distinctively places the pursuit of social justice on a par with the clinical treatment of individuals, pairs and families. Yet for much of the twentieth Century, proponents of the “macro” and of the “micro” approaches to practice have challenged each other’s commitment to social progressivism and humanist values. Interestingly, this on-going debate has hardly changed the core “person-in-environment” psychoanalytic paradigm at all. It is time to set aside this hidebound dispute, I argue in this article: social work is not two institutions folded into one but one profession that must be understood dialectically. Drawing on the history of the early psychoanalyst’s intense social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and working classes, I show how psychoanalysis shares in the transformation of civil society and helps restore individuals and communities alike to self-regulation and productivity.

Efficiency and the Fix Revisited: Informal Relations and Mock Routinization in a Nonprofit Nursing Home

Participant observation in a nonprofit nursing home reveals that informal patterns of work routinization depart markedly from official procedures designed to protect the health and safety of workers and residents. Six aspects of the informal organization of work are found to correspond closely to patterns observed by Roy (1954): the mismatch between time and tasks, the development of new (informal) skills, the institutionalization of rule-breaking, negative effects on quality, the collaboration of shop-level supervision, and workers’ experience of managerial irrationality. However, whereas classic manufacturing studies emphasized upper management's periodic attempts to force compliance to official rules and routines, here upper management engages only in symbolic interventions, collaborating with workers and nursing home residents in the “mock routinization” of work. The article concludes by showing how, in the context of contradictory external workplace regulation, all three parties to the labor process of the contemporary nursing home experience mock routinization as compatible with their own interests.

From Market to State Networking: The Case of a Norwegian Voluntary Organization

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate and explain how a Norwegian voluntary, faith-based organization—the Gospel Centre of Norway (Pinsevennenes Evangeliesenter)—successfully substituted a “network” for “market” strategy vis-à-vis the public sector in order to obtain organizational legitimacy and financial security. During the first decade of its existence it obtained a unique position in its relationship with the state, as a separate item in the budget of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. The organization operates in the field of substance abuse rehabilitation, i.e., in a situation where instrumental effectiveness is difficult to assess. In such a situation ritual or other institutional criteria may replace effectiveness criteria and impression management is shown to be a successful strategy. Attention is paid to the relevant environmental conditions under which this organizational change of strategy was successful.

Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry

Reputation is an important feature in the interactional contexts of work in “culture industries” such as film and television production. But few accounts have examined how reputations are produced in the everyday worlds in which cultural producers live and work. This paper introduces the concept of “reputation work” to describe the front stage and back stage interactional processes through which cultural producers continuously strive to produce their reputations. Drawing on participant observation data gathered at a Hollywood talent management company and a business school course on the talent industry, this paper shows how Hollywood agents and managers perform four types of reputation work. These include how Hollywood talent representatives work to adhere to institutionalized conventions for reputable physical settings, group contexts, giftgiving practices, and selfhoods. Such reputation work performances are done for the sake of “impression management,” but show how this strategic interaction is governed by industry-wide institutions that govern legitimacy.

Use of Self in Relational Clinical Social Work

Since the inception of social work social workers have noted the importance of relationship in practice. More recently clinicians and other social workers have developed the term “use of self” to indicate important aspects of the professional relationship. How that term is defined rests on how one conceptualizes “self.” The authors suggest that from a relational perspective the concept of self changes from the notion of self as separate and constant to self as process in interaction. They demonstrate on a theoretical level as well as through a case example how defining self as process in interaction might affect clinical social work practice.

Modernity and the hybridization of nationalism and religion: Zionism and the Jews of the Middle East as a heuristic case

This article looks at nationalism and religion, analyzing the sociological mechanisms by which their intersection is simultaneously produced and obscured. I propose that the construction of modern nationalism follows two contradictory principles that operate simultaneously: hybridization and purification. Hybridization refers to the mixing of “religious” and “secular” practices; purification refers to the separation between “religion” and “nationalism” as two distinct ontological zones. I test these arguments empirically using the case of Zionist nationalism. As a movement that was born in Europe but traveled to the Middle East, Zionism exhibits traits of both of these seemingly contradictory principles, of hybridization and purification, and pushes them to their limits. The article concludes by pointing to an epistemological asymmetry in the literature by which the fusion of nationalism and religion tends to be underplayed in studies of the West and overplayed in studies of the East/global South.

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Global Civil Society and Its Discontents

According to enthusiasts the concept of global civil society is spreading rapidly and becoming pivotal to the reconfiguring of the statist paradigm. However, critics have recently grown more numerous and outspoken in opposition to the term claiming that it is actually perpetuating statism by grafting the idea of civil society onto the global by way of an unhelpful domestic analogy. This paper examines the role the concept is playing in perpetuating/reconfiguring statism. First it summarizes current criticism by identifying three basic accusations: the ambiguity of the term, the “domestic fallacy,” and the undemocratic effects of using it. Second, these criticisms are considered in turn and it is concluded that all three points relate, ultimately, back to the failure of the critics themselves and some global civil society theorists to move beyond a state-centered framework of interpretation. In the final section it is shown how global civil society discourse is beginning to move not only the concept of “civil society” away from its state-centred historical meanings, but also how it is contributing to changing the content of the concept of “the global.”

Jurassic <Emphasis Type="Italic">technology</Emphasis>? Sustaining presumptions of intersubjectivity in a disruptive environment

While the problem of intersubjectivity has motivated a great deal of sociological research, there has been little consideration of the relationship between intersubjectivity-sustaining practices and the physical environment in which these are enacted. The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) is a strategic site for exploring this relationship. With its labyrinthine layout and bewildering exhibits, the MJT provides a natural “breaching experiment” in which concrete elements of the space disrupt normal competencies for sustaining presumptions of intersubjectivity. Using ethnographic data on visitor interaction, this article specifies two disruptive aspects of the physical environment and identifies four methods of repair on which visitors rely to reestablish presumptions of intersubjectivity. The analysis of spatially situated processes of intersubjective disruption and repair in an extreme case such as the MJT is a first step toward “emplacing” the intersubjectivity problem in more everyday settings.

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Reduced prizes and increased effort in contests

We study the general class of two-player public-policy contests and specify the asymmetry condition under which a more restrained government intervention that reduces the contestants’ prizes has the “perverse” effect of increasing their aggregate lobbying efforts.

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