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.     

The Anthropology of Empty Spaces

We would like to tell an anthropologic story about how we see reality and how we feel about it, with no intention to generalize our reflections. Our version of anthropology is intentionally self-reflexive and self-reflective. This text is a narrative study of the feelings of anthropologists out in the field. The anthropologic frame of mind is a certain openness of the mind of the researcher/observer of social reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). On the one hand, it means the openness to new realities and meanings, and on the other, a constant need to problematize, a refusal to take anything for granted, to treat things as obvious and familiar. The researcher makes use of her or his curiosity, the ability to be surprised by what she or he observes, even if it is just the everyday world. Our explorations concern an experience of space. It aims at investigating the space not belonging to anyone. While anthropologically moving around different organizations, we suddenly realized that we were part of stories of the space we were moving in. Areas of poetic emptiness can be experienced, often in the physical sense, on the boundaries and inside of organizations.     

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.     

Hands: Visible and Invisible

Theoretical work in linguistics, mathematics, and physics has created changes in academic problem formulation. This meta-analysis presents the nature of the new academic environment using precepts from New Historicism to suggest connections with the New Economy. The marketplace is often the court of last appeal in conflict resolution. This can be as basic as determining a fair price for a goose in a farmers' market to the disposition of pension funds in an international merger. Economist Lawrence Summers provides insights into theory and practice. Game theory leads from John Nash's equilibrium point to modeling in economics. A University of Chicago economist discusses the application of market reforms to Chile. He worked with Chilean economists called The Chicago Boys. A call for unification, which includes economics, follows.     

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.     

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 Nomothetic-Idiographic Issue: Some Roots and Recent Trends

A review of the history of the nomothetic-idiographic issue suggests that the problem of the uniqueness of the individual is secondary in this context to that of the right approach to the study of the human person. Idiographic approaches emphasize the need for an unmutilated conceptualization of psychological processes. The requirements of this unmutilated kind of research need to be integrated with those of nomothetic science asking for the controlled gaining and analyzing of information regarding psychological processes. One form of such a kind of integration is represented by biographical studies based on semistructured interviews and a systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of their contents. Findings from such research as especially related to developmental and personality psychology are reported here by summarizing a series of studies conducted at the University of Bonn.     

Durkheim'sdivision of labor in society

The source of social life, according to Durkheim, is the similitude of consciousnesses and the division of labor. The former is best evident among primitive societies where a mechanical solidarity, evidenced by repressive law, prevails; the latter in advanced societies where populations evidence greater dynamic density, and juridical rules define the nature and relations of functions. In combating individualism and basing the existence of societies on a consensus of parts, Durkheim refutes his positivistic emphasis which denies the relevance of ends to a scientific study of society. In his discussion of social ends is a latent anti-mechanistic trend. The theory of unilinear development is established on deficient ethnographic data. It assumes the absence of division of labor among primitive societies and of any mechanical solidarity among modern societies. Repressive and restitutive law Durkheim seeks to use as indexes of mechanical and organic solidarity, but he does not establish with any precision the perfect associations which he assumes obtain between his types of solidarity and of law.Reproduced from theAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 40 (1934), pp. 319–328. (© 1934 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.)     

The Use of Coercion in the Treatment of Incarcerated Juveniles Adjudicated on Sexual Offenses: Consequences and Implications

Since the inception of specialized treatment for juveniles accused of and adjudicated on sexual offenses (JASOs), denial has been an organizing principle. Most clinicians believe that breaking through denial is a necessary prerequisite for successful treatment. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to support this claim. Further, when admitting to one's sexually offensive behavior in treatment becomes paramount, the risk that other therapeutic issues are missed or ignored increases. This article calls attention to the dangers of coercion, in its varied forms, when attempting to get youth to take responsibility for their sexually offensive behavior. Based on interviews with 40 incarcerated JASOs, the author suggests that using presumptive realities as an organizing principle rather than denial, helps to focus treatment providers on their role in the therapeutic process. In using presumptive realities the JASO's story or interpretation of the abuse event is considered therapeutically relevant and reflective of the context in which treatment occurs.     

A quantitative theory of preferences: Some results on transition functions

We investigate a general theory of combining individual preferences into collective choice. The preferences are treated quantitatively, by means of preference functions (a,b), where 0(a,b) expresses the degree of preference of a to b. A transition function is a function (x,y) which computes (a,c) from (a,b) and (b,c), namely (a,c)=((a,b),(b,c)). We prove that given certain (reasonable) conditions on how individual preferences are aggregated, there is only one transition function that satisfies these conditions, namely the function (x,y)=x·y (multiplication of odds). We also formulate a property of transition functions called invariance, and prove that there is no invariant transition function; this impossibility theorem shows limitations of the quantitative method.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation.     

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 treatment of bulimia from a self psychological perspective

This paper examines concepts from self psychology which contribute to the understanding of bulimia. A case example from the author's work illustrates the significance of the sense of self both in the development of bulimic symptoms and also in the therapeutic process. Painful feelings of shame and humiliation over who and what one is are often part of the bulimic experience. The author suggests that therapist's role is not so much to change the bulimic person, but to accept and understand who the person is and how he or she came to be that way. Change often follows such understanding.     

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.     

Head movement during listening turns in conversation

In five subjects, head movement during conversation was monitored by polarised light goniometry, and recorded alongside speech and a signal proportional to peak amplitude of sound waves (peak loudness). Kinematic properties of listeners' head movements, such as amplitude, frequency and cyclicity, differentiated various conversational functions. That is, they were function-specific: symmetrical, cyclic movements were employed to signal yes, no or equivalents; linear, wide movements anticipated claims for speaking; narrow linear movements occurred in phase with stressed syllables in the other's speech (ynchrony movements); and wide, linear movements occurred during pauses in the other's speech. That, it is argued, bears upon the relation between thesignalling of communicative intentions and the synchronisation of interactional rhythm. Thus, the former appears to determine the timing and tempo of responses such as yes and no, while the latter determines the regulation of synchrony movements. The manner in which these factors interact in other conversational functions and their theoretical implications are discussed.     

Structure and process in interpersonal “distancing”

The present paper focuses on awho-why-where-when-how-what-whom structural model of interpersonal distancing. The term distancing denotes either approach or avoidance movement along an intimacy-immediacy dimension. This dimension itself is defined as an integration across proxemic, kinesic, paralinguistic, and linguistic interpersonal modalities. Parallels are drawn between the concepts of intimacy disequilibrium and cognitive dissonance; the latter deals with attitude-behavior discrepancies and the former with attraction-approach discrepancies. A compensatory model is expanded acrosswho's partners as well as across his sensory modalities, and the concept of intimacy overload is offered as a clarifying tool for the social refractoriness and information overload explanations appearing in various aspects of the literature.Paper presented at the Symposium on Some New Approaches for Studying and Measuring Interpersonal Communication, 82d Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, September 1974.The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Department 1229, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the writing of this paper. Much of the work was supported by NSF Grant 2852A at Wayne State University.     

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.     

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).     

Wherein Lie the “Secrets of Life”?: An Argument Against Biological Essentialism

There is a very strong trend in American culture to impute fixed, stable, and universal properties to a wide range of behaviors and conditions, thereby essentializing their qualities and locating them within nature. Both persons with disabilities and queers have been designated as nature's deviants. The author explores parallels and points of divergence in the responses of both disability rights and queer rights activism and scholarship to this assigned classification. She further illuminates this exploration by drawing upon insights derived from growing up with a congenital disability. As a child, the author felt that her body was a text composed, crafted, and edited by those who had the power to manipulate it. Recently, she entered a lesbian relationship, and together she and her partner planned a commitment ceremony that allowed her to reclaim her own body, because the body of the text that ensued was one of their own creation.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

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.