“It's Only Sport”—The Symbolic Neutralization of “Violence”

Within the commodified world of professional ice hockey, athletes sell their bodily performances in return for a salary. A central feature of this transaction is the very real risk of physical injury—a risk inherent within most contact sports, but particularly so within those that feature seemingly “violent” confrontations between competitors, as ice hockey is widely reputed to do. Yet, within the spectacle of sport, where physicality can be constructed as playful and unserious, it is possible for the consequences of such action to be concealed behind a symbolic, ludic veneer. Within this article, we explore this process with a particular focus on ice hockey spectators, for whom notions of sport violence as in some important way “mimetic” of the “real” enabled their propensity to both enjoy, and find moral validation through, potentially deleterious behaviors among athletes.     

DEVIANCE AND LEGITIMACY IN ICE-HOCKEY: A MICROSTRUCTURAL THEORY OF VIOLENCE

Bensman and Gerver's (1964) theory of structural deviance is employed as a general framework for examining the functional indispensability of the fist-fight in ice-hockey. Qualitative materials concerning the players' viewpoint are analyzed, according to Garfinkel (1967), in terms of a conception of practical decision-making used by players in their commission and interpretation of violent acts on the ice. A sociological explanation of hockey violence is thus offered that emphasizes the situationally relevant and meaningful nature of violence as it is experienced and understood by players. It also formulates the fist-fight as an institutionalized mode of legitimate violence that represents a compromise between conflicting ends within the sport.     

“The Paper that You Have in Your Hand is My Freedom”: Migrant Domestic Work and the Sponsorship (Kafala) System in Lebanon

A recent report on migrant domestic work in Lebanon has cited psychological disorder among Lebanese “Madams” as the leading cause of violence against their migrant maids (Jureidini, 2011, www.kafa.org.lb/StudiesPublicationPDF/PRpdf38.pdf ). This report typifies much of the existing scholarship on the experiences of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in the Middle East, where the focus is on employer–employee relationships, especially the abusive Arab “Madam.” In this paper, I argue that the portrayal of violations of MDW rights as abuse of one set of women by another is inherently problematic on several fronts. It privatizes the structural problem of workers’ and immigrant rights violations, delegates it to the household, and absolves the state of its responsibility. Moreover, the focus on abusive employers takes attention away from the root of the problem – the inherently exploitative system of migration and recruitment in the region, the sponsorship system. The sponsorship system not only creates conditions for much of these violations, but also systematically produces a new population of readily exploitable worker – the category of “illegal workers.” Oral histories and interviews with individual workers are employed to analyze the process by which illegal workers are “produced” in Lebanon. Finally, focus group discussions highlight critical policy recommendations made by the workers themselves, which address the systemic bases of their exploitation in Lebanon.     

Blurring the boundaries: Using Gamergate to examine “real” and symbolic violence against women in contemporary gaming culture

Recent controversies in gaming culture (i.e., Gamergate) highlight the lack of attention devoted to discussions of actual violence women experience in gaming. Rather, the focus is often situated on in‐game violence; however, we must extend discussions of in‐game violence and increased aggression to account for the “real world,” violent, realities of women as gamers, developers, and even critics of the medium. As such, we provide context with a brief introduction to the events of Gamergate. We then discuss the connections between the continued marginalization of women both in video games and in “real life.” Drawing from a range of sociological and ludological research, especially Bourdieu and Wacquant's conceptualization of symbolic violence, we examine the normalization of violence towards women in gaming culture. We conclude with considerations for future work involving symbolic violence and other conceptualizations of violence. This focus allows for a more impactful consideration as to why and how codified simulated violence affects marginalized members of communities. Using symbolic violence to connect trends within games to the lived experiences of women in gaming communities binds virtual experiences to “real” ones.     

The “New Mestiza,” the Old Mestizos: Contrasting Discourses on Mestizaje*

This article analyzes varying, inconsistent, representations of “mestizaje” (generally construed as racial or cultural mixing in the Americas) deriving from different historical settings and ideological frameworks. It particularly focuses on what I here term “old mestizaje,” summarized in the writings of Latin American intellectuals of the first quarter of the twentieth century, such as Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (The Cosmic Race); and “new mestizaje,” articulated in the works of such contemporary thinkers as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The NewMestiza). The center piece of the article is the contradictions and fractures between old and new discourses in terms of their underlying views of race, identity, and “destiny.” It examines the links of old mestizaje with essentialist, Social Darwinist, concepts, and the foundations of new mestizaje on a critical cultural studies paradigm. I propose that various aspects of old mestizaje infused hegemonic racial ideologies throughout Latin America and engendered a form of “color blindness” that obscured pervasive racial inequalities in the region.     

“The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel”: Debating between History and Theory

When “History” is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian's revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault's own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida's intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida's position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. “The last refuge of the scoundrel” appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that's based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel's famous saying, that the University is the Protestant's Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.     

Unions and unequal pay: The establishment of the “family wage”

Equal pay laws in many OECD countries establish the right of men and women to equal pay for work of equal value. Nevertheless, during the first half of the 20th century, before the enactment of equal pay laws, employers and unions in several countries promoted unequal pay through “family wage” arrangements. This article seeks to improve understanding of the historical and sociological origins of “family wage” arrangements through both comparative research and in‐depth historical archival research on family wage arrangements in Israel. It shows that unions played a complex role in promoting family wage arrangements. While their action refected their patriarchal understanding of society, they were also guided by socialist principles.     

Defending White Scientific Masculinity

While many feminist and postcolonial scholars have analyzed the post-9/11 politic in the United States, few have focused on the anthrax “attacks” that followed the 11 September 2001 World Trade Center disaster. The FBI search for the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax mailings was an important node in US national security discourse making – it culminated in the fingering of a white male government biodefense scientist and cast doubt on the role of scientific expertise in provisioning national security. This article argues that while “white scientific masculinity” was put into question, it was simultaneously shored up as a nationalist symbol of protection against bioterrorism. This article traces shifts across the three FBI-led profiles of the anthrax perpetrator, along with concomitant news media coverage: the white male “loner” nonscientist, the white male “loner” amateur scientist and finally the white male biodefense scientist. Using a cultural studies approach, this article details how at each successive investigatory stage profilers mobilized hegemonic discourses to re-instantiate the authoritative status of white scientific masculinity in US national security. This analysis offers an important dimension to feminist and postcolonial critiques of the symbolic and institutional investment in white masculinity during the War on Terror.     

(Dis)Empowering technologies: ICT for education (ICT4E) in China,past and present

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are often presented as the cure-all for various problems: ICTs for education (ICT4E) are considered promising tools for promoting self-directed, creative learning and bridging various divides, such as those between developed and developing countries, urban and rural regions, and so on. While the lofty goals of ICT4E are continuously being highlighted, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how these technologies are embedded in sociocultural and political environments. China is no exception to this narrative of techno-determinism. In China, new technologies are being widely propagated as effective instruments for erasing differences between learners and learning communities, particularly with regard to transplanting “modern” education into rural communities. The novelty of twenty-first century ICT, however, tends to obscure the fact that these techno-optimist beliefs date back to attempts in the early twentieth century to uplift rural China through the implementation of modern technologies. The article will scrutinize this history of techno-optimism and will relate it to recent attempts at “transformation by technology.” Finally, I will discuss how the new keyword in both educational modernization and the knowledge economy – “creativity” – functions as the conceptual ideological heir to “production capacity,” the core ingredient of the industrializing societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Criminal sittings – rape in the colony, New Zealand, 1862

In 1862 His Honor, Justice Johnston, issued his instructions to the jury of the New Zealand Supreme Court for two simultaneous rape trials – the alleged rape of a European woman by two Māori men, and an alleged “assault with intent to commit a rape” of a Māori woman by a European man. This article argues that those instructions should be read within an historiographical critique of British colonial expansion, print capitalism and violence. Drawing on feminist postcolonial theorizing the question posed here, is, “What is the historical, ideological context for a newspaper reporting of the possible rape of a Māori woman in 1862?     

Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late‐19th and Early‐20th Centuries

This paper explores the social relationships of wage labour formed or stabilized in British merchant shipping in the course of “off‐shoring” employment in the late‐19^th century. It argues that Asian wage‐workers were mobilized for employment on British merchant vessels as “coolies”, i.e. nominally free but mediated labouring subjects who could only be stabilized through legal, penal, social, debt, or other forms of coercion. Once introduced “coolie” relations were not confined to Indian crews. They also affected wage labour relations more generally in British shipping. While occurring against the backdrop of anti‐colonial struggles, the seafaring coolie's transformation into maritime worker was closely mediated by employers and the colonial state and produced hybrid outcomes. The creation of the modern seafaring “coolie” and the nature and context of his transformation into a “worker” thus shed interesting light on wage labour relations in the modern and contemporary global economy.     

Lightning Rods in the Local Moral Economy: Debating Unauthorized Migrants' Deservingness in Israel

Localized debates about who unauthorized migrants are and what they do, or do not, deserve unfold in a culturally specific register that is deeply charged with emotion and moral valuation. Structuring such debates are vernacular discursive frames that emerge from, and reflect, a common “local moral economy.” Taking Israel as case study, this article examines six elements of the country's local moral economy – biopolitical logic, historical memory, political emotion, popularized religion, an ideology of “fruitful multiplication,” and hasbara (“public diplomacy”/propaganda) – and explores their impact on public debates about unauthorized and irregular forms of migration. Here, as elsewhere, conventionalized distinctions that frame much migration scholarship – e.g. “economic” vs. “political” migrants, “migrant workers” vs. “refugees,” even the terms “authorized” and “unauthorized” themselves – bear but limited salience. Migration researchers who hope to influence local policy debates must recognize the weight and influence of local moral economies, and the chasms that divide vernacular from conventionalized frames. Achieving this sort of nuanced understanding is, at root, an ethnographic challenge.     

Contending masculinities: the gendered (re) negotiation of colonial hierarchy in the United Nations debates on decolonization

The emergence of legal decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, as evidenced by the 1960 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, is often understood through the lens of race and the disruption of racial hierarchy. If we take seriously the transnational feminist contention that the colonial racial order was also gendered, however, how might this perspective shift our understanding of decolonization? In this article, I explore the debates on decolonization that take place in the UN General Assembly from 1946–1960 that lead to the 1960 Declaration from a transnational feminist perspective to answer this question. Specifically, I use comparative historical and discourse methods of analysis to explore how colonialists and anti-colonialists negotiate the onset of legal decolonization, focusing especially on how colonialist hierarchies of race, culture, and gender are addressed in these debates. I argue that, on the one hand, colonialists rely on a paternalist masculinity to legitimate their rule (i.e., our dependencies require our rule the way a child requires a father). In response, anti-colonialists reply with a resistance masculinity (i.e., “colonialism is emasculating;” “decolonization is necessary for a return of masculine dignity”). I argue that decolonization in the United Nations transpires via contentions among differentially racialized masculinities. Ultimately, a transnational feminist perspective that centers the intersection of race and gender offers a richer analysis than a perspective that examines race alone.     

A Reaction to Mark Pope's (2000) “A Brief History of Career Counseling in the United States”

The author acknowledges the significance of the 6 steps presented by M. Pope (2000) in his article “A Brief History of Career Counseling in the United States.” It is proposed that the historical stages for each kind of career counselor are most appropriately organized around federal legislation that affects it. Alternative “stages,” which the author believes are appropriate in tracing the history of the school counselor movement, are presented as an example of this approach.     

Interpretative Freedom and New Combination: The Way in Which the “Middle Class” Has Been Narrated

The English words “middle class” have experienced much more connotations and denotations—typically “bourgeoisie,” “white‐collar,” and professional—than any other class‐referring word since the latter half of the 18th century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalistic theories of class, in that the middle classes were not created until they were named by contemporaries. On the other hand, my view diverges from those theories, in my asserting that the contemporaries have had an interpretative freedom to recognize “middle classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The typical middle class in each period has emerged in such a way that Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leadership but still obtain inconsistent statuses, to be recognized as “middle class”ex post facto in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle classes into a modern society, contrary to the so‐called class decomposition into the two poles.     

“The Past in the Present: Mills,Tocqueville and the Necessity of History”

Historical sociology has achieved a reasonable degree of respectability in the discipline, and there is much interesting work being produced. But a pronounced aspect of much of this work is an indifference to the question of the value of studying the past as a way to understanding the present. This article argues that, rather than trying to outdo the historians by producing “better,” more theoretically sophisticated history, sociologists would better advance the case for historical sociology by showing how any particular historical study helps illuminate contemporary concerns. The article draws upon the writings of C. Wright Mills and Alexis de Tocqueville to show not just the need for historical sociology but also as indications of how this might best be done.     

Towards “cognitively complex” problem‐solving: Six models of public service reform

This article proposes “cognitively complex problem‐solving” as a refinement of the recent problem‐solving approach to public service reform, and as an addition to existing political and institutional explanations for the frequent failure of reform. It substantiates the new problem‐solving model by identifying and selectively reviewing six models of reform that have been practised in developing countries over the past half‐century: public administration, decentralization, pay and employment reform, New Public Management, integrity and corruption reforms and “bottom‐up” reforms. A short case study of Myanmar is presented to illustrate the problem‐solving approach in practice.     

Trends in Latin American Skilled Migration: “Brain Drain” or “Brain Exchange”?

During the last half of the twentieth century the Latin American sub‐continent, historically a region of immigration, became one of emigration characterized by intra‐regional movements and movements towards the developed world, particularly the US. The emigration of highly skilled resources was a new phenomenon in the 1960s and debate on “brain drain” took a significant place in academia and in international organizations. In recent years, within the context of intensification of the globalization process and by virtue of the drive for technological development and the subsequent demand for specialization, the issue has returned to both the arena of political debate and to the academic world. This article presents an analysis of trends in Latin American migration in the context of the new situation. It discusses whether there is a continuation of the “brain drain” phenomenon or the emergence of a trend towards “brain exchange” or “brain circulation”, as appears to be occurring in other parts of the world.