Young people and prostitution: an end to the beginning?

Since the mid‐1970s, we have developed in England and Wales a complex and sophisticated inter‐agency system dedicated to protecting children from abuse. However, we have failed to apply it effectively to the protection of young people sexually abused through involvement in prostitution. This paper examines some of the reasons for this failure and identifies a number of characteristics of the child protection system which seem to fit it poorly for work with these young people. It is argued that lasting improvement in their well‐being depends on the creation of truly ‘joined‐up’, integrated, interdisciplinary services addressing the whole range of their needs. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Knowledge,identity and the middle class: from collective to individualised class formation?

This paper highlights a number of strong indications of important changes in the work and labour market experiences of professionals and managers, the core of the ‘new middle class’(nmc) in most contemporary class theories. Following an outline of some of these changes, it is argued that several central theoretical strategies shared by class theorists -notably a residual ‘functional essentialism’ and the choice of microfoundations - prevent them from adequately theorising these changes. The paper offers an altemative approach to theorising the contemporary nmc that avoids the reductionism of many existing approaches, and that is grounded in microfoundations focused on the relation of narratively constructed identities to social action. On this basis, an account of the contemporary emergence of a new segment of the nmc, the ‘nmc bricoleur’, is outlined, and its relation to empirical studies of the changing nmc is suggested. The paper concludes with some speculations about the likely future of Anglophone new middle classes.     

Race, gender, and sexual orientation in hate crime victimization: identity politics or identity risk?

This study examined the impact of hate crimes upon gay and lesbian victims, reviewing 1538 hate crimes committed in Los Angeles County. Differences between sexual orientation and other hate crime categories were considered for offense severity, reportage to law enforcement, and victim impact. The type of offense varied between crimes classified for sexual orientation (n=551) and other bias-motivated crimes (n=987). Assault, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and stalking were predictive of sexual orientation hate crimes. Sexual orientation bias crimes evidenced greater severity of violence to the person and impact upon victim level of functioning. More violent forms of aggression were predictive of gay and lesbian victim's underreportage to law enforcement. For sexual orientation offenses, victim gender and race/ethnicity differences were predictive of the base rates of crime reportage as well. These findings are considered in terms of a group-risk hypothesis, encountered by multiple outgroup persons, that influences help-seeking behavior and ingroup identity.     

“Grandpa was fatally administered by the Bulgarians1”: Family narratives,national identity,and state history

Grandparents’ World War Two (WWII) stories are emotionally powerful, intimate accounts of firsthand experience that can shape grandchildren's ideas of state history, nation, and identity. This effect, I argue, manifests most intensively in critical times when national history and identity are threatened. Such was the case when former Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev relayed a controversial version of Macedonian national history and identity in a TV interview. In reaction, many Macedonian citizens shared fragments of their grandparents’ WWII stories. This study analyzes several more detailed versions of these grandparents’ narratives in order to ascertain the formative power of family WWII stories over one's personal sense of national identity. To do so, it will examine the positioning practices of the present-day narrators, the grandchildren of WWII participants, focusing on the manners in which they interactively reproduce their own sense of national identity vis-a-vis-these stories.     

Gray and green?: Stewardship and sustainability in an aging society

The natural environment has been a missing part of the context in public policy forums and educational programs when discussing the implications of an aging society. We believe that stewardship and the sustainability of natural resources should be considered in addition to economics and health care when addressing the themes of well-being and quality of life for future generations. This article presents on overview of the usage of the concept environment in aging studies and presents critically important concepts such as sustainability, stewardship, natural capital, carrying capacity, and ecological footprint in recognizing the relevancy of including the natural environment in discussions about our aging society. Also we propose directions for future research and discuss advocacy and organizational activities related to ecology and aging studies.     

Contesting identity of Taiwanese home-care workers: Worker,daughter, and do-gooder?

One of the administrative dilemmas in home-care delivery is that an appropriate and trusting relationship between the home-care worker and the client must be developed; yet this relationship is not readily visible to service managers. Setting up organizational processes for building allegiance and turning the home-care worker into an ideal one become major administrative tasks for home-care managers. Within such organizational context, the home-care worker is then faced with the issue of developing her own identity. This study lays out the Chinese particulars of what being a home-care worker is all about on the ground in Taiwan. In the Chinese context of family and cultural prerogatives around filial daughter and doing good, being a worker (agency perspective) and being a daughter (client's desire) are both problematic. Many home-care workers view themselves as a do-gooder portrayed by the Buddhist discourse of karma. The findings suggest that administrative tasks, client, and worker relationship may appear similar on the surface but the dynamics are quite different.     

Whose ‘wee country’?: identity politics and sport in Northern Ireland

This article responds to calls in this journal for increased attention to identity, culture, power and sport. It explores, for the first time, the lived realities of identity politics in a divided society, through interviews with 12 self-declared Irish nationalists and republicans that represented Northern Ireland. Important insights are revealed into national eligibility decisions for either Irish team, motivated mainly by ‘shop window’ visibility and being seen as the best of a peer group. Political and sporting nationalisms were not necessarily analogous. A significant original finding is that the lived experiences of being closer to ‘the other’ resulted in an overall reinforcement rather than dissolution of difference. Visual and oral ‘national’ symbols such as flag, and especially anthem, delineated such difference, being symbolic walls of the mind. ‘Our wee country’ was thus a polarised and polarising fantasy shield. The article concludes by reconsidering the role of sport as a lens through which to examine identity and its’ place as part of the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’.     

A mediating institution?: Using an historical study of advertising practice to rethink culture and economy

Abstract

This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an ‘epochalist’ concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertising's role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces.     

‘Eyesight to the Blind’: Secular and Religious Dialogue in the ‘Devil's Music’

I adopt a dialogic approach to refute Paul Oliver’s claim that there is no challenge to the authority of the black Church or religion in the segregated ‘race records’ of the first half of the 20th century in the United States. I dismiss the claims of some black theologians that the presence of biblical imagery in the blues means that performers were essentially religious. I show that the dialogue between secular song and religious sermons on record involved mutual parody, satire, and polemic in a common speech genre. Attacks on the Church, its members, clergy, and doctrines were common. Recorded sermons spoke back in defense. Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts offer purchase on the relations between secular and religious recordings in an ongoing struggle for hegemony in black cultural production.     

Robots and cyborgs: to be or to have a body?

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently "feel" and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology in order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body.     

Embodying Nationhood? Conceptions of British national identity,citizenship, and Gender in the ‘Veil Affair’

This article reports on a study of mediatised public discourses on nationhood, citizenship, and gender in Britain, and analyses the ways in which these accounts may be utilised in the cultivation of particular kinds of social identities. We distinguish our approach at the outset from other lines of inquiry to report on a macro level exploration of an event in which these value discourses were operative, namely the national the press reaction to the former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's 2006 comments on the Muslim face-veil or niqab . The article traces and analyses the interactions and intersections of completing but overlapping accounts of nationhood, citizenship, and characterisations of the role of Muslim women. It identifies interdependent clusters of responses that illustrate the ways in which the niqab is a 'contested signifier' in contemporary social and political life, and the ways in which nationhood, citizenship, and gender feature prominently in its signification.     

“Right to the City” and the Structure of Civic Organizational Fields: Evidence from Cape Town

This article proposes a network analytic approach to the role of frames in shaping the structure of civic organizational fields. Adopting a perspective from the global South, it looks at the impact of the expression “Right to the city” (RTC) over alliance building among civil society actors, exploring patterns of collaborative ties among 129 civil society organizations active in Cape Town from 2012 to 2014. The article addresses two broad questions: What is the relation between RTC and other frames that are also frequently invoked to describe urban struggles and issues? Does the RTC frame affect the structure of urban civic organizational fields in significant ways? Data suggest that while RTC plays a significant role in local civil society, it is neither the only interpretative frame that Capetonian civic organizations draw upon to characterize their activity, nor the more salient. “Urban conservation,” especially tied to nature conservation and environmental issues, actually shapes the structure of local organizational fields in a sharper manner. This is, however, a potentially more divisive frame, rooted as it is in the apartheid legacy that still shapes urban dynamics in the city.     

How was a national moving and handling people guideline intended to work? The underlying programme theory

In healthcare, moving and handling people (MHP) often cause musculoskeletal disorders. To prevent musculoskeletal disorders due to MHP, many national evidence-based guidelines have been developed. However, little is known about how these guidelines were intended to work, i.e. their ‘programme theory’, how implementation by intended users is influenced by contextual factors and mechanisms to produce outcomes. This paper identifies the programme theory of a national MHP guideline (MHPG) using thematic analysis of the MHPG document, three organisational planning documents, and interviews with MHPG developers. The analysis identified the intended users of the MHPG as health and safety managers and MHP coordinators. The programme theory comprised contextual factors, potentially hindering (e.g. budget constraints) or facilitating (e.g. changing demographics) implementation, being influenced by mechanisms mainly based on ethical (quality of care, evidence-based practices), and economic reasoning (reducing cost of MHP, return on investment) to reduce injuries caused by MHP – the intended outcome.     

Disciplinary mechanisms and the discourse of identity: The creation of ‘silence’ in an elite sports academy

Organization studies research exposes the need to examine power relations embedded within the design of organizations, the construction of normative behaviour, and the production of socially constructed meanings that lead to the removal of employee voice. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with Premiership football academy members, this article examines the regulation, control and ‘silencing’ of young English professional footballers. Building upon two existing literatures concerning the institutional dynamics of footballing traineeship, and the concept of organizational ‘silence’, the article explains how characteristics associated with surveillance mechanisms and the perpetuation of institutional norms lead to the configuration of a climate of silence. Utilizing the work of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, the article addresses the call for an understanding of the interplay between social actors and the confines of their structural context as an example of restrictive practice and for providing insight into the ‘how’ of silencing.     

Social Impact Investments: Does an Alternative to the Anglo-Saxon Paradigm Exist?

This paper aims to study the characteristics of the Social Impact Investment (SII) market in the absence of its enablers. After the first SII convention in 2007, SII practices have been diffusing especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, which are often referred to as the pioneers in this field. In these countries, SII markets are small but rather advanced in comparison with the rest of the world, and some remarkable cases, such as the launch of the first social impact bond or the establishment of impact funds, have been taken as a reference model worldwide. The final result is an Anglo-Saxon paradigm for SII, which inspires the debate in other countries. The term “paradigm” refers to the presence of some factors that helped the development of the SII market, such as the commitment of highly capitalized foundations, the birth of specialized intermediaries and the endorsement of the state. However, the extent to which the absence of these facilitating factors prevent the SII diffusion or if an alternative to the Anglo-Saxon paradigm can exist is still a question, at the base of this paper. Thus, the objective of this research is to analyse who can play a role in the SII development and how players organize in such circumstances. The study looks at the Italian scenery, through the lens of the network theory. Results show that organizations do not renounce to SII and can play several roles to catalyse the market, using different collaborative configurations.     

Gender and social conformity: Do men and women respond differently to social pressure to vote?

In this paper, we re-analyze data from a large-scale field experiment (N = 344,084) on voter turnout in order to determine whether men and women respond differently to social pressure aimed at voter mobilization. To date, there have been mixed results regarding the interaction between a person’s gender and receptivity to social influence. On the whole, our analyses confirm prior findings that social pressure increases voter turnout but uncover little to no evidence of gender differences in receptivity to social pressure cues in the context of political participation.