UNIONS, PLANTS, JOBS, AND WORKERS

The relationship between unions and their members is an important, yet neglected, subject in recent studies of the sociology of work. This study develops and tests a theory of union satisfaction and participation that combines recent research in the sociology of work with previous explanations of union satisfaction and participation provided by industrial relations researchers, in an attempt to understand the relationship between unions, plants, jobs, and workers in U.S. manufacturing industries. This theory predicts that union members will be satisfied with their unions and participate more in them if there are extensive ties between workers, employers, and unions. These ties stem from the focus of labor/management relations in particular, and class struggles in general, on market outcomes and the historical linkage of union membership with employment in the United States. The theory also predicts that unions them-selves act as ties to specific work settings and that union participation is a forum for voicing dissatisfaction with specific characteristics of workers' jobs. Testing these predictions is complicated by contradictory nature of the structure and organization of work in advanced industrial societies. The analysis provides qualified support for this theory, with data drawn from more unions, plants, and union members than have been used to date. In addition to discussing modifications to the theory and analysis presented here, the study includes a discussion of its implications for the future of unionization and the organization of work, in light of declines in union membership, increased efforts to decertify unions and resist union organizing efforts, and deindustrialization in the United States.     

Involvement in Family,Religion, Education,Work, and Politics

Abstract

This paper explores the relationships among five spheres of individual involvement: family, religion, education, work, and politics. A theoretical framework stressing the extent of structural differentiation in modern societies led to the hypothesis that the spheres of involvement would be quite independent. Within the context of differentiation, it was hypothesized that the spheres of education, work, and politics on the one hand and family and religion on the other would be most highly related. Data from a national sample of retired professional baseball players allowed examination of these hypotheses for three age cohorts (30–49; 50–69; 70 and over) and three life cycle stages (early in the respondents' playing careers, late in their careers, and at present). The data generally supported for the hypotheses, but also suggested some important extensions of the theory. The implications for future theory and research on involvement are discussed.     

Soziologische Theorie, Methoden, Migrationssoziologie, Arbeitssoziologie, Wirtschaftssoziologie, Mitbestimmung, Umweltsoziologie

Literaturbesprechungen

Soziologische Theorie, Methoden, Migrationssoziologie, Arbeitssoziologie, Wirtschaftssoziologie, Mitbestimmung, Umweltsoziologie     

Conditional Families and Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,Transgender, and Queer Youth Homelessness: Gender,Sexuality, Family Instability,and Rejection

Existing research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth homelessness identifies family rejection as a main pathway into homelessness for the youth. This finding, however, can depict people of color or poor people as more prejudiced than White, middle‐class families. In this 18‐month ethnographic study, the author complicates this rejection paradigm through documenting the narratives of 40 LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. The author examines how poverty and family instability shaped the conditions that the youth perceived as their being rejected because of their gender and sexuality. This rejection generated strained familial ties within families wherein the ties were already fragile. Likewise, the author shows how being gender expansive marked many youth's experiences of familial abuse and strain. This study proposes the concept of conditional families to capture the social processes of how poverty and family instability shape experiences of gender, sexuality, and rejection for some LGBTQ youth.     

Anorexia, undernutrition, weight loss, sarcopenia, and cachexia of aging

During the period between 2000 and 2030, the number of persons older than 65?years is projected to grow from 550 to 937 million worldwide. Globally, this growth represents an increase from 6.9 to 12?%. Studies have found that 74.6?% of women and 67.4?% of men aged 65?years or older suffer from many clinical and subclinical syndromes and problems, including anorexia, undernutrition, weight loss, sarcopenia, and cachexia, which are often overlooked or managed inadequately. These issues are very common in the elder. The key clinical question is whether these changes in the elder are distinct entities or an interdependent continuum. In this article, we reviewed these issues of related basic, clinical knowledge. The purpose of this review is to enhance the recognition of anorexia, undernutrition, weight loss, sarcopenia, and cachexia.     

Digitization,the Internet,and the Arts: eBay,Napster, SAG,and e-Books

Via four case studies we explore the extent to which digitization is transforming how people access and engage with the arts. The first case study is the online auction house eBay. We focus on a unique system whereby millions of users rate each other's integrity and reputations in a digital venue via a transparent system open to all users and visitors alike. The second case study examines the Screen Actors Guild strike against the advertising industry, which drew attention to the potential for and limitation of the replacement of human actors by digitized replicas. Third, we focus on e-books in the context of the prediction that most books, music and film entertainment will eventually be distributed electronically to the average household. The fourth case study analyzes the Napster debate over file sharing and duplication of online music. We focus on the ability of Napster to create a huge community of users sharing their own copies of digital music. From this point of view Napster represented a uniquely efficient and large-scale dream, a modern form of the cooperation and sharing of property envisaged by classical anarchist philosophers of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, and as always in anarchistic uprisings, another class claimed proprietary ownership in the material being shared and saw in Napster mostly collective theft on the part of ordinary citizens. Three of these four case studies centrally involve ordinary people using the digital media in creative and innovative ways. We conclude by arguing, against those who are skeptical about the transforming power of digitization, that even in the short time that it has been widely available digitization has so increased people's ability to interact creatively with products that this amounts to a qualitative change which, over the next few decades, is likely to develop so far as to justify the label revolution.     

Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,Transgender, and Queer Media: Key Narratives,Future Directions

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have become a familiar presence on the media landscape. For more than half a century, scholars have examined the importance of this recognition. In this article, I extend the work of British sociologist Ken Plummer to argue that key narratives have endured in discussions of LGBTQ media. These narratives include the victim, the community, the militant/queer, and the assimilationist. In addition, this paper points toward new directions for analysis and discussion; I argue that future research should take a more nuanced approach by examining overlaps and tensions among these stories.     

Opioids,cannabis, confidentiality,ethics, buprenorphine among highlights of 2019

Opioids are still the dominant news story in the substance use disorder (SUD) field. Last year saw continued funding from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — and, of course, Congress — for the treatment field. Formulations of buprenorphine, the looming loss of confidentiality protections, the growing acceptance of cannabis, and a focus on quality and ethics were among the important stories for ADAW readers.     

The Good King Dagobert, or Clever, Stupid, Nice, Nasty

Children aged 8-10 years in 11 primary schools were asked to draw a very clever person, a very stupid person, a very nice person and a very nasty person. The elicited drawings were analysed for content revealing commonalities and some stereotypes. Cleverness was shown to be gender-independent. Clever people shown were good at maths, wore glasses, and were happy and confident. Stupid people were predominantly male, unhappy, bad at maths, anxious, untidy and small in stature. They were shown as having a negative self-concept. Nice people were mostly female, pretty, smiling and kind. Nasty people were male, aggressive, large, often 'punk' and threatening. It is suggested that the 'stupid' group corresponds to those with learning difficulties and the 'nasty' group to those with behaviour problems. These represent anxiety, threat and disadvantage, whereas the more fortunate are characterised by confidence, prosperity and happiness. This paper uniquely uses the images generated by the children themselves in response to stimulus words. Drawings are independent of verbal report and give children freedom to respond creatively. A comprehensive range of drawings illustrate the paper.     

WOUND,SURFACE, SKIN

The essay draws on four recent artworks which have been highly controversial or visible in South Africa since 2010, in order to explore concepts of wounding and political autopsy on the one hand, and of skin surface on the other. The discussion aims to elaborate on and render increasingly complex both the wounds that won't heal, and which erupt into public life through responses to artworks, and the healing over of a wound along a skin surface which artists are exploring in its multiple senses of a cover, a form of cladding, and as a membrane of feeling. Each of the artworks imply a complex relationship between the domains of public and private, and invoke the intimate, or sites of vulnerability, including the dead body, as a means of reimagining the social. They draw on histories of violence to re-compose the aesthetic project: histories of violence, that is, are resisted, forced open, surrendered to, and generative of unforeseen subjectivities.     

Testing,One, Two,Three, Testing: An Attorney Perspective

SUMMARY

This article addresses the attorney perspective on the use of psychometric testing in the context of family law child custody evaluations. Although attorneys, judicial officers and child custody evaluators “use” psychometric testing in family law matters, the ways in which each discipline uses the information gleaned from the results of these tests as administered to child custody litigants can differ substantially. This article distinguishes the attorney perspective from the mental health perspective in the use of the results of such tests.     

CHARISMA, RITUAL, COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE, AND SELF-ESTEEM

Durkheim expected ritual in conjunction with collective effervescence to transform the psyches of individuals; Weber held similar expectations for charisma. Yet, little work examines the social-psychological effects of charisma and ritual. The present study remedies this oversight, examining the effects of charisma, ritual, collective effervescence, and other variables on self-esteem.
Data are drawn from the Zablocki-Bradley-Aidala national sample of urban communes. This study includes 286 individuals from 44 groups. About half of these groups (including about half of the individuals) have a charismatic leader. The groups also have varying types and numbers of rituals.
The results indicate that the existence of a charismatic leader significantly interacts with group rituals and group size in affecting group members' self-esteem. Individual involvement in collective effervescence, and interpersonal power positively affect self-esteem regardless of charismatic leadership. The results are robust in the face of a variety of methodological controls.     

Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Transgender Families

This article reviews new scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families. The past decade witnessed rapid expansion of data and strong research designs. The most notable advance was in studies on variation among mostly planned lesbian comother families. Cumulative evidence suggests that although many of these families have comparatively high levels of shared labor and parental investment, they may not be as “genderless” as previously depicted. Gay men's diverse paths to family formation and planned parenthood have also been explored, but almost no research studies their children's experiences. Conceptualizations of sexual orientation expanded to include bisexuals and others, and some understanding of the experiences of transgender people has begun to emerge. Future work should explore relationships among members of the families they create.     

Science,Critique, Authority,and Accountability

This essay is written in response to Fujimura and Holmes’s piece “Staying the Course,” published in the December 2019 special issue of Sociological Forum—Resistance in the Twenty-First Century     

Woman,man, lady,horse: Jane Stewart,public relations executive

Public relations scholars know very little about the women who participated in formal public relations before the 1970s, not even about such women as Jane Stewart, who served as vice president and then president of Group Attitudes Corporation, an independent consulting firm that became a subsidiary of Hill and Knowlton of New York in 1956. Because she was virtually alone among women at the top consulting firms, Stewart was forced to perform a delicate balancing act.Jane Stewart prospered in the man's world of a Manhattan agency by accepting the conservative values of the field and the era. But she also developed a collaborative management style and maintained a female, if not feminist, perspective that at times gave her clients a different outlook on public relations problems. This article describes Stewart's career in the context of women's participation in formal public relations.The author is an assistant professor in the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.     

Rape,Jokes, Consent

All jokes pose a problem of consent: what does it mean to hear them out; what does it mean to laugh? The problem is acute in the case of rape jokes. This paper discusses two concepts of consent raised by Vanessa Place’s “If I Wanted Your Opinion, I’d Remove the Duct Tape,” legal consent and aesthetic consent, and the relation between them.     

Witchcraft, genealogy, Foucault

This paper is a genealogical reflection on both the historiography of European witchcraft and the dynamics of witchcraft trials. I argue that traditional scholarly assumptions about the 'unsophisticated' nature of early modern European mentalities result in inadequate representations of accused witches and of the social contexts and processes of the trials. Genealogy, by contrast, problematizes fundamental notions such as reason, order, power and progress in ways that not only provide a different range of effective tools for the analysis of belief in witchcraft, but also underline its crucial significance for social theory. In the final section, an analysis of a typical trial is undertaken employing key genealogical insights into confession, torture, truth, governmentality, power, pleasure and pain.     

Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,Transgender, Queer,and Questioning Youths' Perspectives of Inclusive School-Based Sexuality Education

Sexuality education is perceived as one way to prevent unhealthy sexual behaviors. However, current sexuality education materials are not tailored to fit the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth, and many have been critiqued for disenfranchising these populations. This study solicited the perspectives of LGBTQ youth on their experiences with school-based sexuality education in order to create a framework of LGBTQ-inclusive sexuality education. Five semistructured focus groups (N = 30 LGBTQ participants) were conducted to investigate the sexuality education experiences of LGBTQ youth and to solicit youth suggestions for improving the inclusiveness of sexuality education curricula. Results indicate that LGBTQ youth perceive current sexuality education as primarily “exclusive,” although examples of “inclusive” sexuality education were provided. In addition, participants provided suggestions for creating a more inclusive experience, such as directly discussing LGBTQ issues, emphasizing sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention over pregnancy prevention, and addressing healthy relationships. Educators and policymakers can use these ideas to help improve the quality of sexuality education—not only to make it more inclusive for LGBTQ youth but to make sexuality education more inclusive for all young people.     

Conceptualizing Violence Against Gay,Lesbian, Bisexual,Intersexual, and Transgendered People

Abstract

This article provides a conceptual model for defining antigay violence that incorporates the diverse manifestations of such violence, its multilevel nature, and its structural and ideological foundations. Interconnections are made among oppression, power, moral exclusion, and stigmatization. In particular, the impact of heterosexist oppression, including its roots in the moral and medical paradigms, and gender oppression are explored.