Aesthetic Identity,Race, and American Folk Music

This article uses the concept of aesthetic identity to interrogate the relationship among musical genres, social movements and racial identity. American folk music has at some times subverted and other times reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in twentieth-century United States. Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres represent our or their art, music, and literature. Genre boundaries then become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some other, either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music, American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to predominantly African- influenced, but with most exhibiting both. Before the era of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance. The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural project in the late 1930s and 1940s. Both academic elites and political activists constructed the genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording industry had dubbed race records and hillbilly music. American communists and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era. Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially unified genre, but quickly became whitened. My explanation for why the folk revival was so white revolves around three factors: the continuing legacy of commercial racial categories, the failure of the New Left to control music through a cultural infrastructure as effectively as had the old left, and the cultural momentum of an understanding of folk music as the music of the other at a time when blacks were trying to enter a system that white middle-class youth were rejecting.     

The Chicago School,So-Called

Many sociologists believe in the myth of a Chicago School, a unified and coherent body of thought and research practice carried on at the University of Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Chicago never constituted such a coherent system and is better understood as a school of activity, a group of people who cooperated in the day-to-day running of a major department.     

When “justice” is criminal: Lynchings in contemporary Latin America

cross Latin America, the 1990s saw an increase in popular lynchings of suspected criminals at the hands of large crowds. Although it is often assumed that these incidents involve random, regrettable, and relatively spontaneous acts of violence or throwbacks to the past, I argue in this article that these represent purposeful, powerful, and deeply political acts. Most literature on the region tends to regard contemporary violence as a predominantly top-down phenomenon—by state against citizen, landowner against peasant, mestizo against Indian—yet these incidents reveal a new sort of violence that originates at the bottom. I argue that the lynchings suggest an attempt by embattled communities to reassert their autonomy after decades of repeated assault by state armies, local elites, the globalized economy, and other adversaries. By enacting these highly ritualized, unequivocally public displays of justice, marginalized communities seek not only to punish and to deter criminal activity, but perhaps more importantly, to reassert themselves collectively as agents rather than victims. In this way, lynchings may reveal a dark side of what passes for democracy in the region.     

Collective violence in China, 1880–1980

Conclusion This article began by noting that certain current theories of rural violence, predicated upon the demise of the peasantry, are of limited applicability to China. However, it is not my intention to argue that China scholars should therefore feel free to ignore general theories altogether. Quite the contrary. As the preceding discussion has tried to show, general theories are of considerable value in illuminating our understanding of specific cases of raphy cleaves to a rigid five modes of production approach, in recent years alternative arguments have gained some currency. The least innovative of these alternatives is a resurrected Asiatic Mode of Production theory, an approach whose main appeal lies in its claim to Marxist legitimacy. Though Marx and Engels should be credited for the recognition that hypotheses developed to account for West European history may be ill-suited to explain the social history of India or China, their resort to an Asiatic Mode has, quite properly, drawn criticism. For one thing, Asian societies differed markedly among themselves. For another, the allegedly despotic political systems of Asian countries did not in fact prevent substantial socioeconomic change over time.Despite these familiar criticisms, however, in some respects the theory is of interest to the student of China. As Marx described it, the foundation of Oriental despotism was actually collective property, in most cases created through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining... The key to a powerful state, in other words, was the strength and isolation of local corporate communities. The theory is interesting for the attention it focuses upon two elements: the state and local collectivities.Recently in China, a number of theorists - while rejecting many of the assumptions of the Asiatic Mode - have nevertheless retained its concern with state and local society. Some theorists, characterizing the Chinese polity as an ultrastable system (chaowending xitong), have stressed bureaucratic continuity. They emphasize the homeostatic properties of the imperial political system: flexibility provided through peasant rebellions, migration, partible inheritance, and the like. Such safety-valves, these theorists suggest, allowed periodic changes in the ruling elite, but no fundamental alteration of the strong state structure itself.Other theorists, emphasizing China's small-peasant economy (xiaonong jingji), look to the peculiarities of traditional Chinese agriculture for the key to her historical experience. Chen Ping, for example, identifies the Chinese concentration on grain production, in contrast to Europe or the United States where grain production has been balanced by animal husbandry and forestry, as a critical factor. By his account, the mixture of agricultural pursuits in the West encouraged a division of labor, commercialization, and scientific progress. The Chinese system, by contrast, stunted such developments and served instead as a secure foundation for landlord-bureaucratic domination. According to Chen Ping, it was small-peasant agriculture that constituted an ultrastable economic structure (chaowending de jingji jiegou). Although particular dynasties came and went in periodic peasant rebellions, the limiting economic system continued to reproduce despotism. Chen Ping's lessons for contemporary China are basically economic: utilize the international market, diversify beyond grain production to develop an ecologically balanced agriculture, encourage a type of industrialization that complements agricultural needs.Though the critique presented by the small-peasant economy theorists remains largely in the realm of economics, another group offers a more directly political challenge. These are the writers who characterize contemporary China as operating under a system of agricultural socialism (nongye shehuizhuyi). According to their analysis, the persistence of small-scale production has given rise to a pernicious bureaucratism that permeates all facets of socialist China. Cadres - chosen for their peasant class origins rather than for any expertise - are said to operate by principles opposed to economic progress. Administrative fiat, maintained by political force, overshadows efficiency as the criterion of operational feasibility. While arguing that the root of the problem lies in small-scale peasant production, the agricultural socialism critics insist that bureaucratism has become a major barrier to further development.Limited as these various formulations are, their attention to state and local peasant society resonates with a central theme of this essay. Much more research is needed to delineate the precise structure of state and local collectivities, interactions between them, and variations over time and from one geographical setting to another. But eventually such work promises to take us nearer to the reality of the Chinese case than we can hope to approach through the wholesale transfer of theories devised to explain quite different historical developments. The peasant studies school, whose central thesis hinges - ironically enough - on the demise of the peasantry, offers but partial explanations for a society whose peasants refuse to die.

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Adolescent Women's Recommendations for Enhanced Parent-Adolescent Communication About Sexual Behavior

Family communication about adolescent sexual health and behavior promotes adolescent health and family connectedness. However, few studies seek the perspective of adolescents regarding their recommended strategies for family communication. Findings of a survey of female adolescent family planning patients (n = 249) indicated adolescent recommendations for better family communication included treat teen as an equal, 63%; increase parental knowledge about lifestyle and peer pressures, 61%, and improve parental listening skills, 61%. There were no statistically significant differences according to age, pregnancy history, or school enrollment status for suggested strategies for improved communication with parents. Sexually active adolescent daughters expressed interest in maintaining family connectedness and support with increased time for family activities as well as increased quality and quantity of dialogue between the adolescent girl and her parents.     

Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

The rational peasant

Conclusion I have made assumptions about individual behavior diverging from those of the moral economists. These assumptions have drawn attention to different features of villages and patron-client ties and have led to questions about the quality of welfare and insurance embedded in both villages and vertical patron-client ties. This, in turn, has demonstrated that there is more potential value to markets, relative to the actual performance level of these other institutions. Commercialization of agriculture and the development of strong central authorities are not wholly deleterious to peasant society. This is not because capitalism and/or colonialism are necessarily more benevolent thàn moral economists assume, but because traditional institutions are harsher and work less well than is often believed.Depending on the specific conditions, commercialization can be good or bad for peasants. In many cases the shift to narrow contractual ties with landlords increases both peasant security and his opportunity to benefit from markets. In Latin America, the patron held life-or-death judicial authority over his dependent serfs, and the murder of peasants or the violation of their wives and daughters was not uncommon. As long ago as the fifth century, a monk described the transformation that overcame freemen who became part of estates: all these people who settled on the big estates underwent a strange transformation as if they had drunk of Circe's cup, for the rich began to treat as their own property these strangers. Single-stranded relationships may be far more secure for the peasant because there may be less coercion, an absence of monopolies, competition among landlords, and less need for submission of self. The development of an independent trading class can give small peasants easy low-risk access to international markets and a way of escaping the domination of large lords who use coercion to control the economy despite inefficient practices. Independent small traders like the Chinese in Vietnam, for example, are opposed not by peasants, but by large landowners. In particular, erosion of the traditional terms of exchange between landlord and tenant is not the only way for peasants to turn against large lords. It is not the case that if the patron guarantees the traditional subsistence level, peasants will cede him continuous legitimacy; peasants can and do fight for autonomy when better alternatives exist in the market. There are often better opportunities for peasants in markets than under lords, and markets can reduce the bargaining power of the lords. Indeed, it was not uncommon in Europe for men to buy their way out of clientage for the security and freedom of markets. One need only note the land rush in the new areas of Cochinchina after the French made it habitable to see that markets can be an enormous opportunity for the poor. Throughout the world, peasants have fought for access to markets when they were secure enough to want to raise their economic level and redefine cultural standards! In medieval England, when peasant conditions were comparatively secure.The essential quarrel between the peasantry and the aristocracy was about access to the market. It was not that the peasants were worried about the impact of the market in a disintegrating sense upon their community; what they wanted was to be able to put their produce on the market and to have a freer market in land which would enable them to take advantage of the benefits of the market. The rise of strong central states and the growth of a market economy, then, even in the guise of colonialism and capitalism cannot always be directly equated with a decline in peasant welfare due to the destruction of traditional villages and/or elite bonds. In the short-run, local village elites with the skills to ally with outside powers may reap the most benefits from new institutional arrangements, but, in the long-run, new elites emerge which ally with the peasantry against both feudalism and colonialism. Indirectly, peasants clearly benefit from the growth of law and order and the resulting stability, as well as the vast improvements in communications. The numerous and onerous taxes of the colonial period - as applied by village elites - increased stratification in the majority of countries, but the colonial infrastructure also led to wider systems of trade, credit, and communications that helped keep peasants alive during local famines. As Day has noted of Java, local crop failures were so serious in precolonial times before there was a developed communications and trade network because it was impossible to supply a deficit in one part of the country by drawing on the surplus which might exist in another. Colonialism is ugly, but the quality of the minimum subsistence floor improved in most countries. By stressing the common investment logic of intra-village patron-client and market relations I have attempted to show that given the actual performance levels of patrons and villages, neither decline nor decay of peasant institutions is necessary for peasants to enter markets. Further, peasant support for revolutions and protests may represent not decline and decay, but political competence.

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Making Minorities: Cultural Space,Stigma Transformation Frames,and the Categorical Status Claims of Deaf,Gay, and White Supremacist Activists in Late Twentieth Century America

This article compares the efforts of movement activists in three dissimilar groups to replace a stigmatized status with a valued one by portraying their groups as resembling established minorities (claims of contiguity in cultural space) and as differing from groups stigmatized as deviant (claims of distance). The most common claims assert similarity to African Americans, and frequently incorporate civil rights themes (exemplifying frame diffusion). Tactically, these minority status claims exploit both the resonance of cultural pluralism and state recognition of minorities. Strategically, minority status framing enables stigmatized groups to claim legitimacy without changing — simultaneously asserting both normality and difference.     

The merton thesis: Oetinger and German Pietism,a significant negative case

The Merton thesis identifies two movements — English Puritanism and German Pietism — as causally significant in the development of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. It attributes this connection to a strong compatibility between the values of ascetic Protestantism and those associated with modern science. This article questions Merton's conclusion regarding one of these movements, German Pietism, by arguing that the Pietist ethos stood in sharp conflict with what Merton has called the normative structure of science. One manifestation of this conflict involves Friedrich Oetinger's articulation of a contending religious-mystical conception of science, which assigned a central place to feeling, intuition, the role of the divine, and a qualitative approach to nature. This conception of science, it is argued, provides the clearest indication of the conceptual and valuative distance that tended to separate Pietists from the new science of the 17th and 18th centuries.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1990 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, in Virginia Beach.     

Like A Virgin: Temptation,Resistance, and the Construction of Identities Based on “Not Doings”

Despite the attention given to what actors do, identity theorists give virtually no attention to those behaviors in which individuals do not engage, the assumption being that these acts are not influential. In this article, I use the generic case of the virgin identity to demonstrate the social construction of what I term never identities, a subcategory of the various identities based on not engaging in particular acts (simply, not doings). Through the use of fictional genre, it becomes evident that such identities are not based on absence alone, but are more about demonstrated resistance to the trials of temptation and the evaluation of these tests by others. While this article focuses on the construction of such identities under specific historical circumstances, I argue that the findings lay the groundwork for further exploration of a largely overlooked yet critical area of identity research. Future research on never identities should consider the temporal norms of such identities (e.g., the expected stay in such states), the degree of technical purity required, and the issue of directionality (i.e., whether one can return to such identities subsequent to exiting).     

The impact of revolution on social welfare in Latin America

Conclusion The foregoing analysis assessed ways that revolutions affected the social welfare of Latin Americans. It compared differences between societies of roughly similar levels of economic development that did and did not have revolutions, revolutions ushered in by different class alliances, revolutions instituting different modes of production, and revolutions occurring in countries differently situated within the world economy. The class transformations in Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, and Peru gave rise to more egalitarian societies than they displaced, but low income groups in each country gained most during the new regimes' consolidation of power. Subsequently, the interests of the popular sectors were sacrificed to those of middle and upper income groups. The rural masses benefited from revolution mainly in conjunction with agrarian reforms.Agrarian reforms have been promulgated in all the countries under study, but a much larger proportion of the agrarian population and a much larger proportion of the farmland has been redistributed in the four countries that had political upheavals than in the paired countries that did not. Whereas all the land reforms perpetuate minifundismo, recipients of land titles enjoy a modicum of security and the opportunity to appropriate the full product of their labor, which rural wage workers and peasants dependent on usufruct arrangements do not.Examining the countries that have had revolutions shows that peasants and workers do not necessarily benefit most when they participate in the destruction of the old order. Peasants and rural farm laborers gained land where they were disruptive, but in Mexico only after a global Depression weakened the ability of large landowners to resist expropriation. The Peruvian experience demonstrates that rural laborers may benefit even if they are politically quiescent at the time of the extralegal takeover of power, and that they may, under certain conditions, gain benefits sooner after revolutions from above than after revolutions from below. The level of development of the economy and the way the societies have been integrated into the world economy historically limit what Third World revolutions can accomplish, quite independently of how the upheavals originated. The four revolutionary governments adapted land policies to property relations under the anciens régimes, and they reorganized agriculture to profit from trade. Global constraints have also been one factor restricting labor's ability to improve its earning power and influence over the organization of production. Labor did benefit from the upheavals, but as the postrevolutionary governments became concerned with attracting foreign investment and foreign financial assistance, and with improving profits from trade, labor was marginalized. The Mexican-Brazilian comparison, however, suggests that the middle class and the small proportion of workers employed in the oligopolistic sector benefit more and the richest 5% less in societies where civilian groups have been incorporated into the political apparatus as a result of revolution than in equally industrialized societies where they have been excluded, in the absence of revolution.Revolutionary-linked forces may modify the income generating effect of capitalist industrial dynamics, though not to the advantage of the lowest income earners.The dominant mode of production instituted under the new order is the aspect of revolution most affecting patterns of land and income distribution and health care. To the extent that ownership of the economy is socialized the state has direct access to the surplus generated. Although the Cuban state has not consistently allocated the resources it controls to low income groups, because the Castro regime need not provide a favorable investment climate, it can more readily redistribute wealth downward than can the capitalist regimes. It accordingly has also been freer to redesign the health care delivery system in accordance with societal needs rather than business interests and market power. But the Cuban experience suggests that the distributive effects even of socialist revolutions can be limited. Although socialism allows certain allocative options that capitalism does not, the capacity to improve the welfare of Third World people by any revolutionary means is constricted by the weak position of less developed nations within the global economy, by investment-consumption tradeoffs, and by internal political and economic pressures.     

Racial classification in criminology: The reproduction of racialized crime

The (re)production of knowledge about crime is cultural in terms of the questions asked, the comparisons made, and the hypotheses selected to explain crime causation. Since criminologists do not operate in a vacuum, any prejudgments, biases, and beliefs acquired before their professional socialization may well persist and affect their approach to research over the course of their academic careers. Because American criminologists live in a society that racializes a number of problem behaviors, including crime, it is conceivable that widely held beliefs about race that predate graduate training will find their way into assumptions about the relationship between race and crime. Such preprofessional beliefs are transformed into facts when they meet with widespread agreement from other criminologists and thus come to be taken for granted in the objective pursuit of knowledge. Crime is racialized, for example, when the criminal behaviors of individual black offenders are understood in terms of racial traits, racial motives, or racial experiences. When traits, motives, or experiences are classified as the property of whole races or racial communities, these conceptions of race assume causal significance in explaining criminal behavior. Because these traits, motives, and experiences are supposedly shared by entire races or race-class categories, the predisposition to criminality becomes generalized beyond individual Black criminals to whole races or racial communities of noncriminal Blacks. When crime is thus racialized, whole communities or whole categories of phenotypically similar individuals are rendered precriminal and morally suspect. In addition, such racializations in academic criminology can be used to justify increased control of individual black criminals in the larger society; these controls can also legitimately be extended to encompass whole communities and whole categories of phenotypically similar persons who are not involved in crime. This paper will address the role that racializing assumptions play in traditional criminological theories.     

Bargaining with set-valued disagreement

It is arguable that in many-two person bargaining situations disagreement leads to a set of possible payoffs with no probabilities attached to the elements of the set. Axioms are developed for bargaining games of this kind and solution concepts are derived from these axioms. Particular attention is paid to what are here called the max-max and rectangular general solutions. The latter can be applied to an important sub-class of bargaining games where the disagreement set is equal to the feasible set.A part of this work was done while I was a visitor at the University of Stockholm. For valuable discussions and comments I am grateful to T.C.A. Anant, Salvador Barbera, Bhaskar Dutta, Efe Ok, Jorgen Weibull and an anonymous referee of this journal. The paper also benefited from a presentation at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.     

Courage in the Telling: The Critical Rise and Fall of David Leavitt

Openly gay American fiction writer David Leavitt, who had received positive reviews for his previous novels and short story collections, was sued in 1993 over his novel While England Sleeps by English poet Stephen Spender, who claimed that Leavitt plagiarized an episode from his own 1951 memoir World Within World, and grafted pornographic fantasies onto his biography. The accusations created a homophobic backlash against Leavitt, whose career has yet to recover fully. The result is that Leavitt, who had once been viewed as the one gay writer to find a footing in the mainstream literary community, is now firmly positioned in the gay literary subgenre and his work categorized as such. This essay examines book reviews in order to illustrate the difficulties that a writer who deals with gay life frankly and unapologetically finds in being accepted by the mainstream literary establishment, no matter how normal or assimilationist he or others might perceive his work to be.     

Community-based management of psychotic clients: The contributions of D. W. and Clare Winnicott

While the term management connotes images of impersonal care, D. W. Winnicott repeatedly used this term to describe the responsive environmental holding that is central to all human development. Influenced by observations of how normal mothers and families address the physical and psychic needs of children, he and his wife, Clare, a distinguished British social worker, operationalized this concept in finding and supporting facilitating environments with a wide range of disturbed children and adults. Using case material from a contemporary community program for the mentally ill, this paper will review the Winnicotts' important, but often neglected, perspectives on the environmental management of psychotic adults.Presented at the Washington School of Psychiatry, January 14, 1989. I would like to thank Janice Quiter and the Archives of Psychiatry of The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for their assistance in researching the D. W. Winnicott collection.     

The employment contract: A test of the transaction cost theory

This paper tests some predictions derived from Williamson's transaction cost theory of the organization of work, which holds that the form of the employment relationship is determined largely by the idiosyncrasy of work—that is, the nature of skills and knowledge used in production. It examines the occurrence of theoretically relevant provisions in collective bargaining agreements in the United States and finds they are related to a contract-level proxy for idiosyncrasy (based on bargaining structure) as predicted by the theory. An analysis of an individual-level variable, the difficulty of finding a comparable job, provides some additional support. Finally, several alternative explanations of the results are considered, and it is argued that none are consistent with the evidence. The analysis thus finds strong, if necessarily provisional, support for the theory.     

No Place Called Home: Life Quality and Purpose of Homeless Youths

Subjective quality of life (SQOL) has been reported to display remarkable resilience to objective circumstances. This is thought to derive from the capacity to interpret experience in positive ways, but is defeated by very adverse circumstances. This raises the question of whether such positive mental devices are able to adequately protect the SQOL of homeless youths, who typically face substantial objective trials. This study compares youths who are homeless or at risk of homelessness with youths living consistently with their families (control group). It was found that both the homeless and at risk youths reported significantly lower SQOL. These youths also reported lower levels of personal meaning than the control group, and higher existential vacuum. Of the variables measured, personal meaning provided the strongest prediction of SQOL, challenging theories that would predict choice/responsibleness to provide the predominant contribution. Lack of differences in response between homeless and at risk youths suggests that subjective difficulties may precede homelessness rather than stem from it. A model is proposed to describe the possible factors involved in the maintenance and erosion of SQOL.     

Touristic authenticity,touristic angst,and modern reality

The tourist has become the symbol of a peculiarly modern type of inauthenticity. This paper explores the criticisms that have been directed at the reality experiences of the tourist. In so doing, the following inexhaustive typology of touristic realities is developed: 1) the first-order or true tourist, 2) the second-order or Angst-ridden tourist, 3( the third-order or anthropological tourist, and 4) the fourth-order or spiritual tourist. Each of these types represents a progressively more intense search for reality through travel. Each is, however, criticized for participating in its own form of inauthenticity.After exploring the reality experiences and criticisms of each of these travellers, the paper turns the tables on the cultured despisers of tourism to argue that perhaps the lowly first-order tourist is not so inauthentic after all. True, this traveller may not be having a real heroic adventure, but such is not the goal. Rather, the reality experienced by the first-order tourist is a pleasurable liberation from the normal concerns of everyday life which simultaneously reaffirms commitment to that reality. Quite frequently the first-order tourist is less concerned about having a real experience in the visited place than in experiencing family and friendship relationships-relationships completely ignored by the anti-touristic tourists in their search for authenticity in someone else's reality.The author would like to thank Peter L. Berger, Harry C. Bredemeier, Warren I. Susman, and M. Kathy Kenyon for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported in part by NIMH grant no. 5 T32 NH14660.     

Snarls,Quacks, and Quarrels: Culture and Structure in Political Process Theory

Political process theories of social movements have relied on a set of oppositions between culture and structure that has limited their capacity to capture the supraindividual, durable, and constraining dimensions of culture. The solution is not to abandon an emphasis on objective political structures in favor of potential insurgents' subjective perceptions of political opportunities, but rather to probe the (objective) resources and constraints generated by the cultural dimensions of political structures. Such a perspective would pay closer attention to the cultural traditions, ideological principles, institutional memories, and political taboos that create and limit political opportunities; and would link the master frames that animate protest to dominant political structures and processes.     

The Practice of Multimodal Approaches, the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Communication, and the Search for Responses

The development of multimodal approachespresents an opportunity for human beings to increasetheir competence in managing complexity, while at thesame time brings a challenge of cross-culturalcommunication. Some claim that two approaches have beenproposed for tackling this challenge: an approach offrameworks and an approach ofdiscourse. Some go further to contenddropping frameworks and taking up discourse. This paper argues that, if it istrue that there exist these two approaches, neither theframeworks nor the discourseapproach alone is sufficient. It is suggested thatresearchers and practitioners may be better equipped byparticipating in discourses with and among frameworks.Employing three metaphors, this paper proposes that, inthe way force-fields andconstellations require and imply each other, both frameworks anddiscourse are necessary for human beings to act as aPeircian fiber-cable in socialproblem-solving.Requests for reprints should be addressed to Zhichang Zhu, Department of Information Systems, Lincoln School of Management, Lincoln LN6 7TS, United Kingdom.