Traditional Gift Giving Among Pacific Families in New Zealand

The Pacific population in New Zealand is socially disadvantaged and over-represented in adverse social and health statistics. A cohort of 1,376 mothers of Pacific infants were asked about traditional gift commitments and the effect that these commitments had on the financial situation in their household. Sixty-two percent reported that they and/or their partner usually gave to their family or church, with 66.5% of this group giving to family in New Zealand, 58% to family in the Pacific Islands, and 75.9% to their church. Fifty-nine percent of these mothers reported that this gift commitment made their household financial situation more difficult. Factors significantly associated with gift giving are discussed, together with implications of these findings for Pacific families living New Zealand.     

Gift Giving, Identity, and Transformation: The AIDS Memorial Quilt

Those who have originated the AIDS Memorial Quilt have often referred to it as a gift. In this essay, the author discusses theories related to gift giving to discuss the quilt and its constructed effects for those who experience it as a gift. In particular, Weiner's notion of inalienable possessions is highlighted to address how the quilt, as a gift that is kept inalienable from its original creators, maintains historical identity and immortality for its originators, many of whom are gay and bisexual men. Also, Hyde's notion of erotic gifts is presented to consider the quilt's ability to draw people together, create feeling-bonds among them, and affect their transformation.     

Social Network Challenges to Reducing Consumption: The Problem of Gift Giving

Social networks are typically associated with recruitment tactics. In this article, I offer an additional perspective on social networks as a constraint to social change and an under‐recognized challenge to reducing consumption. I draw on 45 interviews with: voluntary simplifiers, religious environmentalists, and green home owners. Informants, failing to withdraw from gift‐giving networks, instead (1) negotiate a reduction in gift giving, (2) green gift giving, and (3) attempt to transform gift giving into a tactic for lifestyle change. Rather than viewing social networks as channels for cultural cohesion, I argue that we need to better conceptualize the way culture and networks are co‐constituted by tactics of influence within areas of contention.     

Gender Differences in Charitable Giving in Great Britain

The predominant part of the literature states that women are more likely to donate to charitable causes but men are more generous in terms of the amount given. The last result generally derives from the focus on mean amount given. This article examines gender differences in giving focusing on the distribution of amounts donated and the probability of giving using micro-data on individual giving to charitable causes for Great Britain. Results indicate that women are generally more generous than men also in terms of the amounts donated. Quantile regression analysis shows that this pattern is robust if we take into account gender differences in individual characteristics such as household structure, education, and income. The article also investigates differences in gender preferences for varying charitable causes. Results are presented separately for single and married people, highlighting the very different gender patterns of giving behaviour found in the two groups.

Addiction,Power and Gender

This paper examines addictive behaviour in relation to power and gender and introduces the notion of ‘addiction as a disordered power arrangement embedded in gender’ (Bepko, 1989). The notion of power in terms of relationship positions and their impact on addictions is discussed. The popular concepts of powerlessness and co-dependency are examined in terms of their clinical usefulness and compatibility within this framework.     

Exploring the Gaps between Meanings and Practices of Gender Equity in a Sport Organization

This article analyses the explanations organizational members used to make sense of the meanings and practices of gender equity. Studying gender equity as an organizational value provided a way of understanding how gender inequity is perpetuated and embedded in the culture of an organization. This study was informed by post‐structuralist feminist theory as it provided a lens for understanding and critiquing the local meanings and production of gendered knowledge, and encouraged discussion of transforming meanings and practices. This study was situated in a Canadian university athletic department in which gender equity was an espoused organizational value, but gender inequities were evident. Data were collected from in‐depth interviews with administrators, coaches and athletes, observations of practices and competitions, and the analysis of relevant documents. These data were coded and categorized using Atlas.ti. Respondents' explanations for the gap between what was espoused and what was enacted centred on two dominant, but contradictory, themes: a denial of gender inequities and a rationalization of gender inequities. These themes suggested respondents often understood inequities as expected, natural, or normal.     

The Democratic Sex: Gender Differences and the Exercise of Power

ABSTRACT

Few have studied differences between how women and men lead, particularly at the local level. This article addresses this gap by reporting the results of a unique study of 192 female mayors and 192 male mayors in cities with populations of over 30,000 to consider whether the female mayors emphasized different policy issues and whether the women in local leadership created alternative decision-making processes in allocating resources. Overall, the results show similarities on policy issues, the use of power, and budget issues. However, some key gender differences emerge. Female mayors were far more willing to change the budget process, be more inclusive, and seek broader participation. Finally, more women mayors than men were willing to admit fiscal problems and discuss changes in their goals. Women mayors were also more likely than their male counterparts to believe that women face gender-based obstacles in the exercise of leadership.     

Gender and the Meaning of Power and Politics

This paper examines the extent to which women as a group have a distinctive understanding of politics and power. Using the theoretical framework of the perceptual-representational system and the Associative Group Analysis (AGA) methodology, the study examines the subjective differences in political meanings of 148 male and female delegates attending their respective Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1984. The data do not indicate that a unique male or female subjective political culture exists. Both Republican men and Democratic women comprehend a politics of connectedness. They differ in terms of the nature, purposes, and type of connectedness.     

Giving at Work: Exploring Connections Between Workplace Giving Campaigns and Patterns of Household Charitable Giving in the USA

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This research addresses an area of philanthropic study that is becoming an increasingly important revenue source for the...     

Charity and Gift Exchange: Cultural Effects

Our intent in this paper was to provide experimental evidence for the Gift Exchange Mechanism in the context of charitable donations in Pakistan. We chose a simple and elegant experiment of Falk as the basis for our experiment. Due to institutional differences, we replaced his postal campaign for charitable donations by a door-to-door campaign. The additional opportunity for social interaction, and cultural differences, led to substantial and unexpected variation in the results. Most importantly, in direct contrast to results of Falk, both frequency and average size of donations declined with increasing gift size. Thus the GEM failed to operate in this experiment. We provide some potential explanations for this surprising result. Our experiment also provides some information on gender and income effects on charitable donations, which vary from main findings in the literature. In particular, we find that females contribute more in frequency and size, and that the share of giving declines with income.     

Diversification as a New Disciplinary Power: Gender and Sexual Subjectivity in Postmodernity

Nowadays, the power of gender and sexuality works not only to reinforce and reconstruct the essentialized norms but also, in direct opposition, to deconstruct these norms. The new disciplinary power and its discourse encourages people to have diverse and fluid self/body images. This article aims to discuss the new characteristics of gender and sexual self-image, body, discourse, and social images in postmodern society through a comparison with Foucault's arguments. This article also briefly mentions how these phenomena have spread through society and questions whether recent social movements really go beyond the style of the former one, which is based on sharing the same identity.     

Averting the Gaze: Gender and Power on the Perfumed Picket Line

This paper argues that the interplay of masculinity as a social construction, masculinism as an ideology, and patriarchy as a political system is grounded in the ontological condition of anxiety as a response to undecidability. Gender differences initiate the desire to resolve the ambiguities and incompletenesses experienced through the lack of the Other. In phallogo-centrism this means the masculinist claim to dominate and legislate epistemologically — to determine meaning for others and resolve, deny, or banish ambiguity. This resolution is, of course artificial and embodies within it fear and anxiety because of its own contingency. This condition then emerges in particular situations and events where the resolution of ambiguity is problematic. The paper takes the managerial problems experienced during the strike by Cathay Pacific Airways flight attendants as one such example. Tensions between emotional display and rational argumentation in the strike turned the status quo on its head. Management mounted an emotional defence of its position in language which evoked rationality but which was not itself a rational argument, revealing its origins in anxiety and the true fragility of its position. Flight attendants turned the seductive skills which company training had developed into an effective weapon to mobilize public opinion. Management were faced, not by the look or averted gaze of the normally supine stewardesses, but the committed, articulate, organized and consolidated stare of rebellious employees who had re-eroticized the workplace as a power play.     

Competencies for Addressing Gender and Power in Couple Therapy: A Socio Emotional Approach

Power imbalances between partners are intrinsic to relationship distress and intricately connected to emotional experience, couple communication processes, and socio cultural contexts such as gender. The ability to work with the power dynamics between partners is thus critical to the practice of couple therapy. However, few practical guidelines for dealing with this issue are available. The authors present seven clinical competencies regarding gender and power issues that they identified by examining their own work: (a) identify enactments of cultural discourse, (b) attune to underlying socio cultural emotion, (c) name underlying power processes, (d) facilitate relational safety, (e) foster mutual attunement, (f) create a model of equality, and (g) facilitate shared relationship responsibility. Each competency is illustrated through a case example. The competencies represent an over‐arching guide to practice that may be integrated with other clinical approaches and is particularly useful for training and supervision.     

Doing Difference/Doing Power: Negotiations of Race and Gender in a Mentoring Program

This study is an empirical exploration of how people negotiate structural inequality and interpersonal power relations through the interactive accomplishment of difference. The author presents data on a mentoring program in which college women were paired with middle school girls across race, class, and age differences. The data show white mentors' status and authority depended less on the program's structure and more on the middle school girls' interactional maneuvers to make race difference particularly salient in the mentoring relationships and, more important, to establish a set of meanings for racial difference that made African American higher in status than white. Bridging research and theory on “doing difference” and status relations, the author argues that the accomplishment of difference alone is not the main mechanism by which structural inequalities are produced in everyday life. Instead, the accomplishment of difference is reflective, productive, and sometimes divergent of structural inequalities when, within interaction, people (1) accomplish difference in a way that raises the salience of that difference for defining the situation and (2) establish meanings that define that difference as a status hierarchy.     

Gender Power and Property Relations Within Entrepreneurial Wealthy Families

This article challenges the popular image of middle and upper class women as beneficiaries and consumers of wealth and correspondingly of men as the central agents in the creation of wealth. Rather this paper demonstrates that women are active in the generation of wealth, but are not given the recognition they deserve, and are increasingly marginalized in the management and ownership of wealth. In seeking to explain this, wealth formation will be identified as a process constituting three stages: wealth creation, wealth accumulation and wealth preservation, whereby gender relations underlined by patriarchal practices propel male kin to positions of power and influence whilst overshadowing female kin. Data for this paper have been drawn from the findings of a study of 70 rich families in one of the midland counties of England and includes industrial, commercial, landed and ‘old’ and ‘new’ wealth.