Bringing society into the body

Conclusion: putting some body sociology Drawing on Marx and Engels's critique of Feuerbach, as does Turner, we can come to some new directions for sociology to pursue. Marx and Engels argue that Feuerbach's contribution lies in reasserting the importance of the material world (in contrast to the neo-Hegelian idealism that prevailed in German thought at that time). Feuerbach's vision of nature is ahistorical. Marx and Engels argued that nature does not confront human actors as a constant, but is transformed through human activity. Nature (including human nature) is mediated by historical circumtances. When I view a California landscape, I see trees, brush, grass, and so forth. These are indeed organic but the particular type of vegetation, the state of its growth and development, its specific ecology, the atmosphere and climate of the region, the contours of the landscape and other features all have been strongly modifed by human activity. In that sense, they are not just nature but historically socialized nature. Particular historically socialized environments, in turn, affect the creatures who inhabit and transform such environments.     

Bringing Identity Theory into Environmental Sociology

In an effort to explain pro‐environmental behavior, environmental sociologists often study environmental attitudes. While much of this work is atheoretical, the focus on attitudes suggests that researchers are implicitly drawing upon attitude theory in psychology. The present research brings sociological theory to environmental sociology by drawing on identity theory to understand environmentally responsive behavior. We develop an environment identity model of environmental behavior that includes not only the meanings of the environment identity, but also the prominence and salience of the environment identity and commitment to the environment identity. We examine the identity process as it relates to behavior, though not to the exclusion of examining the effects of environmental attitudes. The findings reveal that individual agency is important in influencing environmentally responsive behavior, but this agency is largely through identity processes, rather than attitude processes. This provides an important theoretical and empirical advance over earlier work in environmental sociology.     

Bringing Business into Sociotechnical Theory and Practice

Current developments in the sociotechnical framework address a number of vital issues that failed to occupy the high ground in its formative years. These include: (i) the purpose of the systems, to create customer value under social and resource constraints, (ii) the context or external business environment, and (iii) the dynamics of the sociotechnical system. Due attention to the dominant issues of purpose, context, and their dynamics make it more meaningful to speak of sociotechnical business systems (STBS) and organizational learning instead of sociotechnical systems (STS) and individual learning. In STBS each unit in an organization has business responsibilities and goal-based couplings with its environment and focuses on the creation of customer value. The implications of this shift from STS to STBS are discussed and illustrated with current research and two summary case studies.     

Bringing Assisted Living Services into Congregate Housing

Beginning in April 2000 and continuing for 21 months, Florida's legislature allocated $31.6 million (annualized) to nursing homes through a Medicaid direct care staffing adjustment. Florida's legislature paid the highest incentives to nursing homes with the lowest staffing levels and the greatest percentage of Medicaid residents—the bottom tier of quality. Using Donabedian's structure-process-outcomes framework, this study tracks changes in staffing, wages, process of care, and outcomes. The incentive payments increased staffing and wages in nursing home processes (decreased restraint use and feeding tubes) for the facilities receiving the largest amount of money but had no change on pressure sores or decline in activities of daily living. The group receiving the lowest incentives payment (those highest staffed at baseline) saw significant improvement in two quality measures: pressure sores and decline in activities of daily living. All providers receiving more resources improved on deficiency scores, suggesting more Medicaid spending improves quality of care regardless of total incentive payments.     

Bringing the body back into theory and methodology

This is a discussion of a book by Kathryn Linn Geurts, Culture and the Senses. Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002; and a book by Judith Farquhar, Appetites. Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

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The Presence of Others and Overreporting of Voting in American National Elections

This study uses the 1978 and 1980 vote validation studies conductedby the University of Michigan Survey Research Center to testthe extent to which false claims about voting are affected bythe presence of third parties during the interview. The presenceof third parties during interviews is far more frequent thanis commonly assumed. But the tendency of respondents to givesocially approved answers is not affected by the presence ofothers during the interview. Thus, additional efforts to avoidcontamination of interviews by eliminating third parties arenot likely to reduce the exaggeration of self-reported vote.The analysis suggests that the declared intention to vote isa far more important factor in whether people falsely reportvoting than is the presence of others. Additional effort tounderstand the motivational basis of voting and nonvoting couldhelp to account for variation in voting overreports.     

Bringing assisted living services into congregate housing: housing directors' perspectives

The purpose of this research is to explore the impact of an Assisted Living Services (ALS) program on directors of state-funded congregate housing. Using focus groups, we interviewed congregate housing directors about how adding the ALS program to their facilities impacted their management experiences. Four themes emerged from the analysis of the focus group data: (1) importance of assisted living services for promoting aging in place; (2) "costs" of offering ALS; (3) differences in how the ALS program was implemented; and (4) organizational issues emerging from the merger of housing and health-care models. Based on the present findings, we propose a number of policy issues that need to be addressed when services are added to existing housing.     

Art as Propaganda: Bringing Du Bois into the Sociology of Art

We examine WEB Du Bois's writings about the arts in the NAACP journal The Crisis from 1910–1934 in order to construct a Du Boisian social theory of the arts. The key elements of this theoretical framework are: artists, money, freedom, organization, truth, beauty, and propaganda. The most surprising element is propaganda, which for Du Bois meant that art needs to address racial politics. There is a strong sense in Du Bois's writings that art can and should have socially transformative effects. Comparing Du Bois's work to current theories from the sociology of art, we find that Du Bois emphasizes the role of art in social change, while current work treats art primarily as a tool for social reproduction. We argue for expanding the theoretical toolbox of the sociology of the arts through greater consideration of Du Bois's propaganda concept.     

Bringing Sociology into the Public Policy Process: a Relational Network Approach

How does evidence-based sociological research influence public policymaking either directly or indirectly? Based on an analysis of a 2014 NSF-funded public policy research workshop and written case studies by workshop participants, this article provides a conceptual roadmap and varied examples of the pathways through which social science research and social scientists can inform public policy decision-making. Pathways include networks and relationships among academics, social scientists employed in government, special interest groups and non-profits, and members of the media. Many sociologists are committed to using their evidence-based findings to inform solutions to societal problems, yet are often too narrowly trained to write only for scholarly communities and are often unaware of the relations, connections, and networks that can increase the use of sociological and other social science research in public discourse and in the public policy arena. The paper highlights lessons learned about effective networks, communication channels and dissemination strategies from the workshop and case studies in order to better equip those social scientists interested to bring their research into a public policy realm with the tools to do so. Given the current political climate, this resolve seems all the more important.     

Bringing Women's Voices into the Dialogue on Technology Policy and Globalization in Asia

This article documents an innovative research project 'Monitoring the Impact of Technological Changes in Women's Employment in the Asian Region'. Initiated in 1994 by the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies (UNU/INTECH), the project sought to democratise the dialogue around technological changes and globalization by bringing together NGOs active among women workers, academic researchers and policy makers. It was guided by the assumption that those affected by the impact of new technologies should play a major part in making and implementing policy. Women workers, for example, should be able to lay claim to the knowledge which circulates through international organizations, while national and international policy makers stand to gain by listening directly to groups such as these who frequently are excluded from the benefits of globalized technological changes. Twenty-eight trade union and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worked alongside experienced researchers, covering eight countries and holding a series of both country-based and international workshops. The first research project to attempt direct inter-communication on such an extensive scale, 'Monitoring the Impact of Technological Changes in Women's Employment in the Asian Region' shifted the debate on gender and technology onto the terrain of the actual problems and possibilities currently faced by women workers rather than adopting positions for or against technology. The collaborative research process highlights several priority areas of policy dialogue which have been neglected and indicate ways of organizing which could secure better conditions of work. The evidence uncoveredandthe concerns expressedraise fundamental questions about whose interests and values are shaping the emerging techno-economic paradigm.     

Objects, Words, and Bodies in Space: Bringing Materiality into Cultural Analysis

What can actor-network theory’s approach to analyzing objects offer to cultural sociology? To answer this question we ask a more specific one: How does materiality affect people’s experience of art in a museum exhibition? Research at two museums suggests that non-human agents—object and words—interact with human bodies to choreograph the art encounter. This process works through interactions between two processes of emplacement: physical position and cognitive location. Position guides location in the process of meaning-making, a relationship mediated by three mechanisms: distance, legibility, and orientation.     

Strategies for Preventing Neighborhood Violence: Toward Bringing Collective Efficacy into Social Work Practice

Neighborhood violence has profound effects on issues associated with social work practice, such as health, safety, and the positive development of children, youth, and families. This article brings together the literatures in criminology and public health that examine violence and social work's history in community practice to develop violence prevention strategies. One important concept from the criminology and public health literatures is collective efficacy, defined as neighbors having shared values, trust, and a willingness to intervene in neighborhood problems. By building on the community practice literature and studies from peacemaking criminology, the article provides examples of ways that collective efficacy can be built and implemented in low income neighborhoods. Strategies include awareness of collective efficacy, relationship building, bystander education, and restorative justice.     

Tradition and novelty in concert programming: Bringing the artist back into cultural analysis

Participation in many cultural activity systems, such as art worlds or scientific communities, is highly skewed toward an elite creating a pattern of activity that emphasizes rationality and repeated events. At the same time, the introduction of new works and participants in these systems promotes the opposite, that is, innovation. Rationality and innovative interests are usually approached and analyzed separately, but this article examines a social context in which they are jointly produced—concert music programming. To analyze the dominance of repertory, this paper documents concert programming over a single season and describes a model to illustrate the observed distribution of events. The skewed distribution of programming is then explained through reference to the aesthetic interests of concert artists, that is, composers and performers, and the congruence of a rationalized aesthetic to the recruitment of audiences and administrative rationality.An earlier version was presented at the Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts conference in New York, October 1990.     

Making a difference? Bringing children's and young people's views into policy‐making

As the participation of children and young people in policy decision‐making has spread in the UK, participation work is facing hard questions on its translation from principle to effective practice. The participation literature has been largely self‐referential in its consideration of policy influence. This paper considers the potential usefulness of the UK literature on policy networks, which categorises the relationships between government actors and other interests in policy‐making. A brief introduction is given to this literature. Then a participatory project is examined in light of certain key concepts within the policy network literature. The paper concludes by considering how both the participation and the policy networks literature might learn from each other in future conceptual and empirical work.