Gender,fear, and victimization: A preliminary application of power‐control theory

The accumulated body of research on public fear of victimization has consistently demonstrated that gender is the most useful predictor of tearfulness. However, theoretical attempts to link variations in fear of crime to gender differences have been found wanting. In particular, these theoretical accounts have failed to provide an integrated framework within which it is possible to reconcile findings relevant to gender differences in both fear‐arousing crimes and fear itself. In this article the research on gender differences in fear and victimization is reviewed, and the methodological assumptions that underlie work in this area are critically assessed. The theoretical inadequacies of contemporary explanations of these differences are then made explicit. Borrowing from the work of Hagan, Gillis, and Simpson, it is suggested that insights derived from power‐control theory provide an alternative and potentially more valuable conceptualization of the interrelationships among crime, fear, and gender.     

My Body,Your Body: Speaking the Unspoken between the Thin Therapist and the Eating-Disordered Patient

As thin therapists, who work with eating-disordered patients, we have found that our bodies have an appreciable impact on the treatment. In this article, we discuss issues of transference–countertransference, disclosure, the use of the therapist’s self including the body, and the vicissitudes of the treatment. Patients use the therapist’s thin body in various ways: as evidence to support a number of distorted beliefs and assumptions; as a target of envy; as a container for projections and fantasies. We illustrate through case examples, the importance of including the therapist’s body in the therapeutic dialogue, so that it can be used as a tool, rather than a barrier to recovery.     

Discourses of Work–Life Balance: Negotiating ‘Genderblind’ Terms in Organizations

This article examines current debates about gender equality, work‐life balance and flexible working. We contrast policymakers’ and organizational discourses of flexible working and work–life balance with managers’ and employees’ talk about these issues within their organizations. We show how, despite the increasingly gender‐neutral language of the official discourses, in the data studied participants consistently reformulate the debates around gendered explanations and assumptions. For example, a ‘generic female parent’ is constructed in relation to work–life balance and flexible working yet participants routinely maintain that gender makes no difference within their organization. We consider the effects of these accounts; specifically the effect on those who take up flexible working, and the perceived backlash against policies viewed as favouring women or parents. We argue that the location of work–life balance and flexibility debates within a gender‐neutral context can in practice result in maintaining or encouraging gendered practices within organizations. Implications of this for organizations, for policymakers and for feminist researchers are discussed.     

“Is This Something You Want?”: Genetic Counselors’ Accounts of Their Role in Prenatal Decision Making

With the widespread availability of prenatal genetic diagnosis, bioethical concerns have emerged about why women make use of these technologies, and the potential eugenic implications. Research on women's experience with genetic screening often suggests that genetic counselors encourage women to undergo prenatal testing and to terminate pregnancies with abnormalities. Yet, this key professional remains relatively understudied. To fill this lacuna, this article examines genetic counselors’ accounts of their role in the decision‐making process, drawing on 26 qualitative interviews with master's‐trained genetic counselors and illustrative observations of a prenatal counselor. In the context of debates about reproductive politics and genomic medicine, I identify the ways in which genetic counselors view their work and position themselves. I find that contrary to assumptions, genetic counselors provide accounts of being just as likely to discourage as to encourage invasive testing, and persuade against instead of promote termination of affected pregnancies. These findings suggest that genetic counselors may play a more nuanced and less coercive role than their critics contend, challenge assumptions about genetic counselors’ roles in prenatal genetic testing uptake and abortion, and shed light on how this specific professional may curb rather than promote eugenic tendencies feared with the normalization of prenatal screening.     

Accounting for Divorce: Gender and Uncoupling Narratives

Past research about uncoupling processes has focused on the differing narratives people offer to explain the end of their marriages, depending on whether or not they perceive themselves to have initiated the ending. This article extends previous work by adding gender to the analysis, exploring intersections between accounts of divorce and accountability to cultural assumptions related to gender. In this inductive study, we examine qualitative interview data—particularly discrepancies in the narratives of some men and women—and suggest that gender mediates how people talk about the process of uncoupling as well as their motives for divorce.     

Irregular working times and metabolic disorders among truck drivers: a review

A number of studies to better understand the complex physiological mechanism involved in regulating body weight have been conducted. More specifically, the hormones related to appetite, leptin and ghrelin, and their association to obesity have been a focus of investigation. Circadian patterns of these hormones are a new target of research. The behaviour of these hormones in individuals subject to atypical working times such as shiftwork remains unclear. Shiftwork is characterized by changes in biological rhythms and cumulative circadian phase changes, being associated with high rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome. Truck drivers, who work irregular shifts, frequently present a high prevalence of obesity, which might be associated with work-related factors and/or lifestyle. In this context, the aim of this paper was to discuss the relationship of body mass index, appetite-related hormones and sleep characteristics in truck drivers who work irregular shifts compared with day workers.     

Prohibition on tradition,tattooing, and the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh

Drawing on ethno-historical perspectives and ethnographic study, this article depicts the tradition of tattooing and its eventual prohibition among the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Locally known as tipe, the tradition of marking body and ban within the Apatani society help us understand how economic and political changes in and around the Ziro valley have had an impact on their social and cultural aspects. The tradition of tattooing was part of Apatani culture for several years, but the beginning of the 1970s witnessed that the youth association of the tribe decided to ban the practice in order to help the tribe progress towards what they considered “modernity” and “development,” albeit positioning themselves from the western civilizational discourse.     

Globalization,social work,and social welfare

This paper presents a critical review of globalization as explicated in the social work literature. It argues that writers about globalization and social work have so far accepted an unprolematized and undifferentiated construction of the theory of globalization which does not engage with the significant differences that exist between different accounts of globalization. In doing so they implicitly reproduce neo-liberal assumptions about the role of the state and its relationship to global forces. This results in a reductionist and pessimistic analysis of the fragmentation and deprofessionalization of welfare and social work which is often at variance with empirical evidence. Specifically, the acceptance of a narrow and economically over-deterministic reading of globalization unwittingly depoliticizes debates about social work and undermines resistance to the challenges to welfare.     

Reading Desire: Commentary on Papers by Danielle Knafo,Victoria Pitts-Taylor,and Nikki Sullivan

All 3 papers on body modification share a particular approach to their topic as they are substantially located in discourse analysis and a deconstructive approach to their material, and all are concerned with binaries. All 3 papers also grapple with the matter of interiority. Having explored how these issues play themselves out in the particularity of the practices of tattooing and cosmetic surgery and in the work of Orlan, the author invites further dialogue between Foucauldian analyses and psychoanalytic ones with special reference to the notions of desire and unreason.     

Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut‐out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on‐going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it.     

Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants

Arguing that the deviance literature has presented an overly negative image of norm breaking, some researchers in the 1980s and 1990s began to argue for a category of positive deviance that included studies of individuals who exceed social norms (Ben-Yehuda 1990; Dodge 1985; Heckert 1989, 1997, 1998). The positive deviance perspective inspired several strong theoretical statements suggesting that deviance can only be conceptualized as a negative response to norm breaking (Best and Luckenbill 1982; Goode 1991; Sagarin 1985). The result is a schism between researchers studying positive deviants and those investigating negative deviants. This article looks at two groups within the most elite realm of tattooing, tattoo collectors and tattooists, and identifies how they use both positive and negative deviant attributes to maintain a privileged status on the fringe of society. By exploring an example of individuals who exceed and fall below social norms, I offer two new categories of positive deviance: high culture icon and popular celebrity. In addition, I examine how individuals who occupy both positive and negative deviant statuses challenge assumptions within normative and social response perspectives of deviants and point to larger processes of social change and social stability.     

“Please don’t think of me as a sociologist”: Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge and the early Chicago school

There has been a concerted effort in the last three decades to identify early female sociologists and to add or restore their works to the sociological canon. This effort has generated a substantial body of work, much of which examines the relationship between the women and men of the Chicago School in its early years (1892–1920). Two primary assumptions about this relationship have emerged over the years: (1) the women were frustrated sociologists; frustrated by a lack of acceptance in the discipline and a department run by men; and (2) the women were displaced sociologists, forced out of the discipline by the men into disciplines such as household administration and social work. This paper examines these assumptions through a case study of the life and work of Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge. Breckinridge is among those characterized by the literature as a frustrated and displaced sociologist, but Breckinridge’s own words to a friend, “Please don’t think of me as a sociologist,” suggest that this was not always the case.     

Trust in complementary medicine: the case of cranial osteopathy

Trust has been seen as operating within situations in which an individual's ability to assess risk or probability is absent and yet they still choose to believe in something. The development of new sets of knowledge in modern societies raises interesting questions about how the public come to trust the ‘experts’ who practice them and there is a paucity of work which addresses how trust ‘happens’ in these new relationships. This paper uses the accounts of patients who use cranial osteopathy to discuss the bases of trust in complementary medicine. It is argued that the practitioner and their therapy is not the basis of patient trust. For the initial attendance the patient relies upon the accounts and credibility of other people (network trust). After this it is the phenomenological work of the patient, who strives to find meaning in the treatments they experience, which is essential to the development of trust relationships. The paper demonstrated that patients mobilise ideas and understandings which they are familiar with to understand the unfamiliar and that it is this process of seeking meaning which is central to the creation of trust.     

Clinical social work with chicanos: Some unwarranted assumptions

Generally the literature of social work conveys a negative attitude toward the use of clinical social work with Chicanos. These attitudes result from assumptions that have not been empirically tested. Nevertheless these assumptions have been accepted as valid. This paper identifies and discusses these assumptions in the light of the nature of clinical social work and its objectives. The conclusion reached is that clinical social work is not alien to the needs of Chicanos and can be used successfully with them when the therapist has an understanding of the cultural system and can provide therapy within its framework.     

Exploring Professional Stereotypes and Learning for Inter-professional Practice: An Example from UK Qualifying Level Social Work Education

This paper explores the concept of stereotyping from UK social work students' and educators' perspectives. It discusses findings from an exploration of inter-professional practice with two cohorts of final year social work students in a UK university. The authors adapted a questionnaire to initiate discussion about inter-professional working with BA and MA students participating in a specialist child and family social work module. This paper analyses students' responses to the questionnaire and explores wider issues relating to professional stereotyping and identity, discussing the usefulness of these concepts for social work education and collaborative practice. Results suggest that student social workers held both positive and negative assumptions about specific occupations/professions (such as medicine), and that these acted as a mirror or tool for reflecting back their own views of social work identity/ies. We argue that this pedagogic exercise in identifying stereotypical assumptions about ‘others’ may encourage the building of a positive sense of ‘own’ professional identity. We further suggest that students should be encouraged to construct a core social work identity that is dynamic and responsive to changing contexts.     

The value and purpose of the traditional qualitative literature review

Both meta-analysis and traditional literature or narrative reviews strive to compile a great deal of information in an accessible and succinct manner. In recent years, social work researchers have been turning toward meta-analysis to identify issues in large areas of research. In order for meta-analysis to be a rigorous and objective source of information there are a certain set of assumptions that must be met about how to carry out the process of including and excluding various studies. However, when these assumptions are not met, the information provided can be misleading. Traditional literature reviews continue to offer a valid and important way to identify existing patterns and gaps in social work research. In fact, because they draw not only on quantitative (as does meta-analysis) but also qualitative studies their reach may often be broader. This paper examines the strengths, weaknesses and utility of both practices in social work research today.     

The Accounts of Special Education Leavers

There has been comparatively little analysis of the ways in which pupils within special education describe themselves. This paper looks at the linguistic repertoires that leavers from special education in Central Scotland drew upon in order to account for their presence in what was seen by those around them as a stigmatising environment. Eighteen special education leavers were interviewed: first of all either before or around the time that they left school; and then, for a second time, between twelve and eighteen months later. This study suggests that these special education leavers drew upon at least four different linguistic repertoires to explain their presence within a segregated environment. Two points emerge from these accounts: first that these repertoires accounted for the leavers' presence within special education without drawing upon notions of individual pathology; and secondly, that the accounts of these leavers changed according to the differing accounting tasks that the leavers were faced with. The implications of this research for those who work with teenagers and others who are forced to account for their presence in a stigmatising environment is discussed.     

Self made women,agency and work commitment

The study of work commitment has been confronted by two major impediments. First, a basic problem, is the absence of a shared definition of commitment, a state of affairs that lends support to the view that commitment is a multiple and complex phenomenon. Secondly, most established theoretical frameworks have assumed that commitment to paid work is determined either by an individual's prior life goal or organisational reward structures such as wages and status. The oscillation of the debate has meant that our understanding of the phenomenon is inconclusive. In an effort to move the debate forward this paper develops a theoretical account which conceptualises commitment as a structural mechanism that explains situations where an agent's past and present activity in a social organisation has, in effect constrained their future activity. The paper links these ideas with recent feminist accounts which show that organisations are gendered social structures that have a tendency to reproduce gendered definitions of commitment. The paper concludes that these gendered definitions of commitment constrain women's life-style choices.