Postmodern synergistic knowledge creation: extending the boundaries of disability studies

The tensions between the competing discourses of the medical and the social models of disability have traditionally provided a platform for discussion and research in the fields of disability studies and special needs education. Over the last 30 years a wealth of literature has consolidated the debate and produced particular knowledge of impairment and disability. In this paper we argue that by privileging notions of ‘deficit’ within these medical or social model perspectives the richness of the lived experience of people with impairments is denied. The individual becomes lost within a framework of medical symptoms or social inequalities. This paper considers alternative approaches which reveal a fuller picture of the lives of people with impairments. The authors conducted two separate empirical studies, one employing a Deleuzo‐Guattarian perspective, the other a Bourdieusian perspective. In this paper we illustrate how these theories of practice can reveal situated understandings of the individual with impairments and his/her daily life. By embracing new understandings and different theoretical perspectives we show how new knowledge can emerge to illuminate the fluid and ever‐changing notions of ‘disability’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’, which form elements of the individual lived experience of the research participants.     

Who Cares If Police Become Violent? Explaining Approval of Police Use of Force Using a National Sample

Understanding police violence is important in part because police violence, if generally tolerated, could transform a society based on law into one governed by political and personal whim. This research asks whether the conflict perspective can explain which groups are more likely to approve of police use of force, and whether several dimensions of power are at issue or just a few. Previous studies have found that race is the most important factor in determining approval of police use of force. Gender, age, class, and other variables have shown mixed results. Using a national sample (1998 General Social Survey), this paper contributes a more comprehensive examination of this issue to the small body of literature in this area. We look at approval of police use of force in five scenarios. Our findings show that minorities and women are more likely to disapprove of police use of force. Supporting a narrow application of conflict theory, other dimensions of power appear not to affect attitudes toward police hitting citizens. Context of violence matters too. When situations are not actively threatening for officers, by near consensus, violence is unacceptable. Disagreement comes from less clear-cut circumstances.     

Contemporary organizational theory: The demographic,relational, and cultural perspectives

We review three perspectives—demographic, relational, and cultural—that have dominated sociological research on organizations during the past four decades. These perspectives arose in reaction to the atomistic and rationalist–adaptationist assumptions of earlier perspectives on organizations. These perspectives have different conceptions of social structure and thus different conceptions of what creates opportunities for and constraints on action. The demographic perspective holds that social structure is constituted by distributions of social actors along salient dimensions of social and physical space; the relational perspective, by webs of social relationships; and the cultural perspective, by widely shared and patterned understandings of reality and possibility. These perspectives also have different conceptions of identity and therefore motivations for action. For demographers, identity derives from position, absolute or relative, along salient dimensions of social life; for relational scholars, from ties among individuals, groups, and organizations; and for cultural scholars, from social interaction. All three perspectives have been applied to explain behavior at five different levels of analysis: the individual, group or organizational subunit, organization, industry or organizational population, and field. Up to the 1990s, these perspectives were generally applied separately, but over the past two decades, studies have increasingly used multiple perspectives.     

Changing Gender: The Discursive Construction of Equal Opportunities

This article provides a discursive perspective on the dilemmas of sameness and difference feminisms and their consequences for change projects. It explores how equal opportunity officers dealing with gender issues and introducing equality legislation in practice construct the meaning of equal opportunities. The analysis of the interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas drawn upon in ten interviews shows the highly context‐specific use of four different repertoires constructing gender equality: the sameness, difference, bandwidth and deconstructive repertoire. Interpreting the shifts between repertoires from the perspective of the ideological dilemma, new avenues for change are explored. The article concludes that the simultaneous use of all possible theoretical perspectives might be a worthwhile objective.     

THE PRESIDENCY AND THE PRINT MEDIA: WHO CONTROLS THE NEWS?

Relations between the presidency and the press are often fractious. This is evident in the Nixon Administration's criticisms of the press during 1969, and the more recent charges that President Reagan has leveled at the media. In this article, we first examine three competing perspectives, termed media-subordinate, moderated-effects , and media-autonomous , that explain how the press responds to criticism from the presidency. Next, we use these perspectives to generate a set of predictions about connections between the press and the presidency. We then test the predictions with data from a random sample of 843 American daily newspapers, taken in 1970. The data demonstrate that the newspapers often did change their policies in ways desired by the Nixon Administration. Second, the data show that the more professional (and therefore presumably more autonomous) the editor of the newspaper, the more likely was the newspaper's editorial policy to change in ways desired by the Nixon Administration. These findings undercut the media-autonomous perspective. By contrast, the data provide some support for both the media-subordinate and moderated-effects perspectives. The former perspective predicted changes in newspaper policy and also a relationship between an editor's ideological leanings and changes in his newspaper's policy; the data confirmed these predictions. The latter perspective predicted that changes in newspaper policy would be intermediate in size; this prediction also was supported. In our discussion, we place our findings in the context of contemporary presidency-press relationships, and suggest ways in which the three perspectives need to be developed to account for recent changes in those relationships.     

Producing Drama: Symbolic Communication and the Police*

Organizational analysis, based on a version of symbolic interactionism, is used here to advance a dramaturgical perspective on the relationships between organization, information and technology. Organizations are defined as meaning-production systems stabilized by relatively permanent interactions that are temporally and spatially-based. Ethnographic data, gathered by fieldwork in two police communication centers in the United States and in England, are presented. Each organization receives messages centrally and processes them through three segments (operators, dispatchers and officers). In semiotic terms, the police can be seen to be a means for producing drama, or the selective presentation of signs which either heighten or reduce the salience of other signs in a message. The primary conditions which increase the likelihood of drama being attached to policing are tentatively advanced. The police reduce the salience of emotive or expressive aspects of communication by encoding (recoding) citizens' messages from an aesthetic mode to a logical classificatory code. The greater the information supplied by a caller, the more ambiguity in the call-classification process, and the more interpretation is required. Interpretations rendered are based in part upon segment specific understandings of the meanings of the calls, and in part on more general or shared meanings based upon the occupational culture. The result of these interpretations is that messages become more poetic in character as they move across segments within the system. The police also reproduce their own metaphoric version or map of society in and by their encoding, decoding and recoding actions. By so doing, they maintain the dramatic importance of the police and their actions, and the centrality of myths that reify the notion that the police can and do control all that needs controlling in a society.     

International Nongovernmental Organizations and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Developing World: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis

This quantitative, cross-national study is designed to test hypotheses linking the activities of international nongovernmental organizations to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the developing world. While many quantitative studies of variation in carbon dioxide emissions have been published, none have included a control for the presence of international nongovernmental organizations. We review the literature that discusses the many ways that international nongovernmental organizations work to reduce environmental degradation in developing nations. We then conduct a panel regression analysis in which we include a variable to estimate the effects of international nongovernmental organizations on carbon dioxide emissions while including variables suggested by other relevant theoretical perspectives. Our findings are quite clear in that nations with high levels of international nongovernmental organization presence have lower levels of carbon dioxide emissions than nations with low levels of international nongovernmental organization presence. We also find support for the ecological modernization hypothesis pertaining to the existence of an environmental Kuznet's curve between the level of economic development and level of carbon dioxide emissions.     

Managerial Strategies and the Worker: a Marxist Analysis of Bureaucracy*

Systematic study of the sociology of organizations is almost absent in both the classical and modern Marxist traditions. Although some recent studies in the Marxist tradition show considerable promise, the field has been dominated by the Weberian perspective. The development of new theory should be informed by the Marxian concepts of (a) labor theory of value, (b) the forces and relations of production, (c) historical development of capitalism, and (d) class structure and class struggle. Bourgeois organizational theory has some serious deficiencies, but there is much of value that can be subsumed under the broader rubric of Marxist political economy. The potential for a Marxist theory of bureaucracy is explored in an examination of managerial strategies to minimize external uncertainties in a monopoly capitalist system, and internal uncertainties arising from the work force. Strategies for controlling the work force include the division of labor, organizational hierarchy, rules and procedures, the uses of secrecy and hoarding of knowledge, and the maintenance of ethnic and sexual divisions in the work force. Further research is needed on (a) differentiating capital accumulation and social control strategies, (b) comparisons between workers in the state and corporate sectors, (c) comparisons between work organization under full range of socialist economies and those in capitalist economies in both manufacturing and government and (d) alternatives for the future.     

Soft Repression and the Current Wave of Social Mobilisations in Spain

The current political and economic crisis has fuelled a new cycle of collective action in Spain. The response of the Spanish authorities to this wave of mobilisations has been to strengthen public order. But on some occasions, the excessive use of police force has given rise to problems of image for the Spanish government. To avoid public criticism, the Ministry of the Interior has tried to camouflage police repression by combining the use of truncheons with other, more subtle, coercive measures. The silent nature of such repressive tactics means that their existence is rarely discussed in the specialised literature, which tends to focus on the violent acts committed by the State. However, this type of ‘soft repression’ plays an important pre-penal role within the official strategies to contain the new and challenging social conflict in Spain.     

Prioritizing relationships: The investment model and relationship maintenance strategies in organizational crises

Crisis communication and crisis management are dominated by research in image repair and restoration, but much has to be done to address the lack of research that engages relational perspectives in these fields. Adopting the investment model (Rusbult, 1980) as a theoretical framework and using structural equation modeling, the study develops a crisis relational maintenance model to explain how organizations can (re)build relationships with publics. Survey results show that publics’ commitment and publics’ trust are two significant mediators that influence publics’ relational behaviors post-crisis. The investment model provides a suitable framework to explain publics’ commitment to an organization, with explained variance more than 90 percent, and an organization’s relationship maintenance strategies during and post-crisis significantly affect publics’ trust. Whether an organization’s relationships with the publics can be maintained or repaired depends on whether an organization engages in these relationship maintenance strategies that prioritize publics’ need, which can be reciprocated from publics as publics reorient themselves along with the long-term goals and well-being of the relationships. Results of this study call for further attention on relationship maintenance approaches in crisis communication and management research.     

Social control and the policing of terrorism: foundations for a sociology of counterterrorism

Sociologists have by and large neglected the study of terrorism and counterterrorism. The continued relevance that terrorism may be expected to have in our era should stimulate the development of new sociological ideas. I propose a sociological perspective of the policing of terrorism that is conceptually informed by a neo-Weberian bureaucratization theory of police. The theory holds that antiterrorist efforts at the level of police rest on a formal-rational conception of the means and objectives of counterterrorism, although ideological and political sentiments on terrorism are very intense and divisive within and across national states. Social control and counterterrorism are complex realities, comprised of a multitude of dimensions which are not necessarily in tune with one another. High-profile terrorist incidents, such as the events of 9/11, lead to attempts by national governments and international governing bodies to re-direct police efforts against terrorism in function of political objectives. Yet, because the bureaucratization of modern police institutions is at an unprecedented high level, the theory predicts, police agencies will resist these (re-)politicization attempts to continue counterterrorism activities that rest on an efficiency-driven treatment and depoliticized understanding of terrorism.     

Social context,spatial structure and social network structure

Frequently, social networks are studied in their own right with analyses devoid of contextual details. Yet contextual features – both social and spatial – can have impacts on the networks formed within them. This idea is explored with five empirical networks representing different contexts and the use of distinct modeling strategies. These strategies include network visualizations, QAP regression, exponential random graph models, blockmodeling and a combination of blockmodels with exponential random graph models within a single framework. We start with two empirical examples of networks inside organizations. The familiar Bank Wiring Room data show that the social organization (social context) and spatial arrangement of the room help account for the social relations formed there. The second example comes from a police academy where two designed arrangements, one social and one spatial, powerfully determine the relational social structures formed by recruits. The next example is an inter-organizational network that emerged as part of a response to a natural disaster where features of the improvised context helped account for the relations that formed between organizations participating in the search and rescue mission. We then consider an anthropological example of signed relations among sub-tribes in the New Guinea highlands where the physical geography is fixed. This is followed by a trading network off the Dalmatian coast where geography and physical conditions matter. Through these examples, we show that context matters by shaping the structure of networks that form and that a variety of network analytic tools can be mobilized to reveal how networks are shaped, in part, by social and spatial contexts. Implications for studying social networks are suggested.     

Toward an Organizational Perspective on Identifying and Managing Formal Gatekeepers

In this article, we present an institutionalist organizational perspective on formal gatekeeping, arguing along two fronts: First, identifying gatekeepers provides useful analytic devices for learning about the vocabularies of structure in an organization. Second, successfully managing gatekeepers requires that one understands the vocabularies of structure in use in an organization. We ground our perspective in field experiences gleaned from eleven public sector organizations who participated in our health promotion and research program, the Arizona 5 a Day Project. Field data and insights from institutional organizational and decision-making theory frame a matrix of organizational types and formal gatekeeping. We conclude by linking our perspective with analytic perspectives on organizational charters and organizational change.     

An exploration of the relationship between police presence,crime and firms in developing countries

Economic theory predicts that a rise in police presence will reduce criminal activity. However several studies in this field have found mixed results. This study adds to the literature by exploring the relationship between the size of the police force and crime experienced by firms. Using survey data for about 12,000 firms in a cross‐section of 27 developing countries it is found that increasing the size of the police force is negatively associated with crime experienced by firms. Results are confirmed using a panel of firms for a subset of countries for which data are available. It is also found that this negative relationship is stronger under certain macroeconomic circumstances.     

The contradictions of uneven development for states and firms: Capital and state rescaling in peripheral regions

Recent studies suggest that processes of capital and state rescaling are generating new socio-spatial inequalities within nation-states. I explore rescaling in the understudied context of a peripheral region through the case of a global apparel merchant, Lands’ End, and its decision to relocate its call and distribution centers to Dodgeville, Wisconsin. I argue that an empirical exploration of rescaling in peripheral regions demonstrates the need for two revisions to this literature: (1) an extension of the rescaling literature to capture the multi-scalar construction of socio-spatial inequalities and how the interactions between these different scales influence local outcomes; (2) an extension to firms the kind of analysis that scholars have applied to states—that is, we must consider both the rescaling strategies pursued by states and firms, as well as the contradictions both face as a result of new and existing socio-spatial inequalities.     

Rural child welfare practice from an organization-in-environment perspective

An "organization-in-environment" perspective can help researchers understand how rurality influences child welfare practice. Drawing from theoretical perspectives on environment and organizations, researchers find rural/urban differences in practice at the level of the organization, which is the immediate environment of child welfare practice, and also in the relationship between organization and environment. Results challenge previous findings of few differences between rural and urban practice and offer particular implications for rural child welfare practice.     

Knowledge,boundaries, and bodies: Social construction between medical sociology and science and technology studies

Medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS) emerged from different positions, but often closely related concerns, within the broad discipline of sociology. Their interface and areas of overlap have mostly been shaped by theoretical positions broadly considered “social constructionist.” Taken together, these perspectives provide empirical and theoretical tools to analyze important questions about how social inequalities, forms of scientific knowledge, and patterns of human health come to be produced and feedback into one another. Examining their intersection enables sociological questions such as: How is medical and public health scientific knowledge produced, stabilized, and taken as fact? How are scientific facts about health and illness used, experienced, and challenged? What is the relationship between health inequalities and public health or medical knowledge? This article seeks to briefly trace the important contributions that social constructionist research has made at the interstices of medical sociology and STS, further clarifying the history, points of intersection, and areas of diversion between them. The current COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the political struggles that constitute public health scientific knowledge and circulation. The interface between STS and medical sociology can help us to make sense of the interrelationships between politics, power inequalities, and public health scientific knowledge.     

AN ALTERNATIVE METACRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES FROM A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context.     

Working with a radical agenda: the Musasa project,Zimbabwe

In 1988, a nongovernmental organization, the Musasa Project, was created to combat domestic violence against women in Zimbabwe where such violence is not only widespread, it is also socially acceptable. Therefore, Musasa not only set up shelters and provided counseling to victims of domestic violence, it also attempted to transform society through an extensive public education campaign. This campaign started with the police force through an identification of the problems police officers had experienced in their dealings with domestic violence. Discussions of these problems led to changes in the ways in which victims are interviewed. The police officers also reported difficulties interacting with the legal system which were addressed through a series of workshops facilitated by Musasa for members of the police force and of the legal system. Whereas these actions were both radical and innovative, the project's public statements were cautious during the first 3 years. Since the time of a planned change in leadership (when the original founders withdrew according to schedule), the project has grown increasingly radical and now addresses gender issues through a series of gender workshops designed to expose the workings of the patriarchy and the problems associated with lobola (the bride price).     

Disability and the anti‐obesity offensive

This paper expands a discussion begun by a fat activist in the UK disability literature to argue that fatness is a disability issue. Some ways in which fat people are oppressed by the same ideological practices and values that oppress (other) disabled people are explored. Fatness has typically been excluded from consideration by disability scholars and in this lacuna an equivalence is drawn between attitudes to fatness and psychological distress within disability studies. In conclusion, it urges discussion on theoretical perspectives of disability that embrace fatness and sees this as a prerequisite to developing strategies that enhance both disability and fat rights.