Employers’ responses to the HIV epidemic in sub‐Saharan Africa: Revisiting the evidence

Do employers have a role to play to support people living with HIV? The literature on sub‐Saharan Africa points to the existence of a positive business case that sees firms as incentivized to provide HIV‐related services to HIV positive workers However, the evidence is narrow and incomplete, with the business case holding for a limited number of formal sector skilled workers, leaving out most people living with HIV. If employers are to play a role, policy‐makers need to create conducive conditions for positive responses, in addition to—not in replacement of—strengthening public healthcare systems.     

Against the norm: the transitional symbiosis of ‘grassroots clientelism’ and ‘rural citizenship’

Clientelism has predominantly been represented in the literature as an expression of backwardness and corruption with little attention being paid to the question of how clientelism has changed over the years. In contrast, this paper examines the particulars of state intervention in the agrarian economy with respect to clientelism and exposes the illogicality of contrasting patron‐client relationships with citizenship. The historical focus is on the ways in which, in the course of post‐dictatorship consolidation in rural Greece throughout the 1980s, the transformation of traditional brokerage‐based clientelism into the bureaucratic clientelism of the political parties actually enhanced the institutions and practices of ‘rural citizenship’. Comparative qualitative research on the driving force of agrarian change shows how Thessalian villagers made the transition from being socially excluded subjects to socially included clients in two lowland village communities and the role played by a dynamic state bureaucracy.     

‘It’s like we’re locked in a box’: Girls’ and mothers’ experiences of the police and legal system following child sexual abuse

This article focuses on girls’ and mothers’ experiences of police and criminal justice system responses and the impact of investigation processes following reporting of child sexual abuse. Participants spoke of a lack of timely therapeutic provision and the subsequent role of female caregivers in providing support. Problems with criminal justice processes and the subsequent impact on families’ wider lives were also discussed. Findings suggest that criminal justice processes need to be better attuned to these micro level impacts and should show more sensitivity to the overall experience of children in the aftermath of sexual abuse. Implications for practice are discussed.     

‘There Isn't Supposed To Be a Speaker Against!’ Investigating Tensions of ‘Safe Space’ and Intra‐Group Diversity for Trade Union Lesbian and Gay Organization

Trade union engagement with the continuing inequalities facing minority groups has been one of the guiding principles of attempts to re‐energize the labour movement in recent years. This article focuses on attempts by six British trade unions to create and maintain separate organizational ‘spaces’ for their lesbian and gay members. Through consideration of group representation within a union framework, the strategy of separate organizing and the complications of representing a diverse membership, this article considers issues of intra‐group diversity and ‘safe space’ for this particular group of members. It concludes that the recognition and actualization of the internally diverse lesbian and gay constituency will be important in the long term for trade unions seeking to renew their pool of potential activists.     

‘But It's Your Job To Be Friendly’: Employees Coping With and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector

This article analyses how employees in the service sector respond to sexual harassment from customers and attempts to explain why this is so. There are only a small number of previous studies examining the issue of customer‐perpetrated sexual harassment. Those that have been conducted have detailed the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment from customers, but this research lags behind employee experience and some emerging policy responses to this issue. The extant literature, whilst growing, remains largely limited to documenting the phenomenon. In this article, we attempt to create a deeper analysis of customer‐perpetrated harassment by conducting a new review of the literature to develop propositions about how employees respond to it and the factors that influence their responses. These propositions are analysed in relation to a qualitative pilot study with 15 interviewees who had experienced sexual harassment from customers to understand how they reacted and why. The article shows how the social norms and precarious working conditions of the service sector constrain employees from seeking formal redress, leading to the enactment of informal coping strategies and temporary contestations of the situation. This research is important for building our understanding of the influence of workplace context for framing employee responses to customer sexual harassment.     

‘You can do Nasty Things to your Brothers and Sisters without a Reason’: Siblings’ Backstage Behaviour

This article contributes to the recent, but still limited, literature on the sociology of sibship. It argues that during childhood the ambivalent love/hate nature of sibship is played out through the sharing of knowledge, time and space. It draws on the work of Goffman to illustrate that children's sibling interactions tend to consist of backstage, rather than frontstage, performances. The article is based on children's own perspectives from a sample of 90 children aged 5–17 drawn from 30 families of mixed socioeconomic backgrounds in central Scotland.     

‘We took a bath with the chickens’: memories of childhood visits to the homeland by second‐generation Greek and Greek Cypriot ‘returnees’

Drawing on a wider study of 90 second‐generation Greeks and Greek Cypriots who have relocated to their ancestral homeland, in this article we focus on the significance of childhood visits to the homeland. Freedom – how children were allowed to roam free and stay up late – is the key trope of such memories, in contrast with the strict spatio‐temporal parenting they received in the host country. Different, sometimes less pleasant memories, however, emerge when the visits took place during later, teenage years. We explore the connections between childhood visits and adult relocation. Adult returnees find that settlement in the homeland produces a new set of challenges and reactions that differ markedly from childhood experiences and memories. They engage a second narrative trope, nostalgia, reflecting on the loss of the ‘authentic’ nature of the homeland and its customs and values. Instead, they highlight the materialism and xenophobia of Greek and Cypriot society nowadays. However, they see the ‘homeland’ as a safer place in which to raise their own children.     

A Boy’s Journey and the Journey to Freedom*

The journey to freedom is a literary genre that involves a realization of oppression, a decision to leave, a journey that is both physical and moral, a wilderness experience, a self‐reinvention, and, most importantly, a first person testimonial to the reality of oppression.     

Multidimensional developmental pathways: a proposal to facilitate the conceptualisation of ‘Family Diversity’

This analysis takes Elder's work on the life-course as a starting point. Two proposals are made: (1) That the sociological use of the concept of ‘the family’ should be restricted to indicate only the occurrence of everyday usage; (2) That the notion of the ‘family life-course’ be replaced by the notion of individual life-courses coinciding upon developmental pathways. In this way the idea of a central type of ‘the family’ is made redundant and we are required, instead, to discover when and why participants refer to a particular developmental pathway as being ‘a family’. This approach not only facilitates the conceptualisation ‘family diversity’ but also compels researchers to engage the rich complexity of everyday life.