The how‐to's of governance

Governing for Results: A Director's Guide to Good Governance, by Mel D. Gill. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford Publishing, 2005.180 pp., $37.50 (Can.) paper.     

Women leaders,self‐body‐care and corporate moderate feminism: An (im)perfect place for feminism

This article offers self‐body‐care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism and a manifestation of postfeminism for women leaders. It explains how postfeminism as a bodily practice surfaces through women leaders' body work and how women ‘top' leaders strategize to stabilize their credibility by identifying their own and other women' body work needs and the steps they take to meet these. Self‐body‐care extends understandings of body work as part of postfeminist governmentality and contributes to understandings of moderate feminism as that which deflects and reflects feminism and constrains and empowers subjects. As such self‐body‐care offers an (im)perfect space for disruption and for Gender and Organization Studies (GOS) scholars to pursue the implications and potential of postfeminism. We call for women elite leaders to be part of feminist futures and illustrate self‐body‐care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism by highlighting complexity in the postfeminist thesis and reflexively re‐examining two of our previous published empirical studies of women ‘top' leaders.     

Child sexual abuse: from prevention to self‐protection

There are a growing number of child abuse prevention and education programmes, including primarily group‐based parent and child education, which are taught by teachers within the school system. This article reviews some of the existing sexual abuse education and/or body safety programmes, as well as the research surrounding them. Advantages as well as criticisms of such programmes are reviewed. Issues such as target populations (i.e. children, teachers, parents), programme components and methodological limitations are addressed. Major findings include: children as young as three can be effectively taught self‐protection skills, parental and family involvement in training is important, and repeated exposure helps children maintain knowledge gains. The components of successful programmes include teaching children to identify and resist inappropriate touching, reassuring children that it is not their fault and learning the proper names of their genitals. Finally, future directions for programme development, research and policy are explored. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Women's self‐defense and sexual assault resistance: The state of the field

Public attention to sexual assault has increased dramatically over the last decade, spurring questions about how it can be prevented. One approach that has received scant attention is women's self‐defense training (sometimes known as sexual assault resistance training). This neglect is curious because empowerment‐based women's self‐defense (ESD) training is so far the only approach that has produced substantively significant decreases in victimization rates. In this article, I review the research evidence on women's self‐defense training. Does resisting a sexual assault affect the outcome of sexual violence? Does self‐defense training further reduce women's risk of violence? What are the other consequences of self‐defense training? How does self‐defense work for different groups of women—for example, those who have survived prior victimizations? Are the critiques of women's self‐defense training valid? Finally, what do we still need to learn about women's self‐defense? Overall, I argue that this evidence presents a compelling case that women's self‐defense training should be central to any efforts to prevent sexual violence.     

The revised safe at home instrument for assessing readiness to change intimate partner violence

This article describes the development and factor structure of the Revised Safe At Home instrument, a 35-item self-report measure designed to assess individuals' readiness to change their intimate partner violence behaviors. Seven new items have been added, representing content specific to the Maintenance stage, and other items have been revised to strengthen the assessment of earlier stages and address gender concerns. Confirmatory factor analysis using multisite data (two sites, a total of 281 men at intake) supported the conclusion that a four-factor model (Precontemplation, Contemplation, Preparation/Action, and Maintenance stages) was consistent with the observed covariances. A high degree of correlation between the Preparation/Action and Maintenance scales was observed, but subsequent testing indicated a need to treat the two as distinct factors in the model. It is recommended that scoring include only 31 items that perform well.     

The effectiveness of nonprofit lead‐organization networks for social service delivery

Public agencies increasingly contract with nonprofit organizations to lead community‐based networks for social service delivery. We explore the role that partnership characteristics play in the effectiveness of these networks. Using data on children and family services in Los Angeles County, we consider the impact of both the motivations for forming partnerships and the nature of the resulting partnerships on perceived outcomes for clients, interorganizational relationships, and organizational learning. We find that client outcomes and interorganizational relationships are enhanced when partnerships are formed to meet certain programmatic and organizational goals. Organizational learning, however, is affected only when partnerships are formed to enhance organizational legitimacy. Partners selected because they share common vision increase effectiveness, while those selected because there are few alternative partners decrease effectiveness. Finally, when partnerships use an interorganizational coordination mechanism, client outcomes are improved. The managerial implications of these impacts for the nonprofit sector are developed. The results lend considerable support to the role of partnership motivation and partner selection in the effectiveness of nonprofit lead‐organization networks, and specificity about the nature of that role.     

Children's participation: control and self‐realisation in British late modernity

Children's participation in public life in contemporary Britain is examined in relation to the tension between control and self‐realisation found in late modernity. It is argued that, despite the recognition of children as persons in their own right, public policy and practice is marked by an intensification of control, regulation and surveillance around children. This tension is considered in relation to the constitution of children in the public sphere as human capital and therefore as a means of controlling the future. This is contrasted to the private sphere where children's potential for self‐realisation is increasingly sequestered in the family. It is suggested that these trends raise issues of social inequality, intergenerational justice and institutional disengagement in relation to children. This requires more serious attention to enabling children's participation in the society. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reading self‐help literature in Russia: governmentality,psychology and subjectivity

Self‐help has become a booming business over the past decades and an increasingly visible part of popular media culture worldwide. The paper analyzes the arrival and effects of this cultural technology in post‐Soviet Russia after more than seventy years of socialism. It examines how Russians are engaging with popular psychology self‐help as a technology of the self and how they are making it meaningful in their lives. Drawing on a set of one‐to‐one and focus group interviews conducted with self‐help readers, it examines how these individuals negotiate the new ethics and the normative models of personhood put forward by the self‐help genre. It argues that popular psychology has offered a new language for making sense of the self and the social world, and highlights how the readers critically engage with the normalizing power of popular psychology by drawing on a number of local historically sedimented discourses.     

Abjection and self‐identity: towards a revised account of purity and impurity

Kristeva describes abjection as ‘the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck’. Her account of the ‘abject’ has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s, in part due to high demand for theoretical attention to themes of purity and impurity, which remain important in contemporary society. Yet Kristeva herself has noted that ‘my investigation into abjection, violence and horror … picks up on a certain vacuum’, and other scholars have agreed that there is need for further work on what Campkin has described as an ‘under theorized’ topic. This article will begin by exploring the central line of criticism that has been made of Kristeva's concept of abjection, before then considering an attempt by Goodnow to address these concerns through a re‐reading of Kristeva. Goodnow's re‐reading of Kristeva, together with some conceptual clarifications from Hegel, will point the way towards a more precise account of purity and impurity. I shall contend that Kristeva's work on social abjection sometimes hits upon a pattern, which greater conceptual precision will be able to revise into a new social theory of when and why themes of purity and impurity are invoked in Western societies. It will be argued that impure phenomena are those in which heterogeneity is seen to disturb a qualitative homogeneity, taken to be basic; pure phenomena are those understood to be all‐of‐a‐piece and as a result identical with their essence.     

The democratic deficit of transnational environmental activism: a case study of e‐waste governance in India

The literature on transnational activism often associates environmental NGOs with democratic legitimacy, grassroots representation and environmental justice. Authors employ case studies to demonstrate how engaging in transnational networks increases the political agency of environmental NGOs. Yet, there is a tendency mostly to select successful cases. In this article, I investigate the political activities of the environmental NGO, Toxics Link, surrounding the recycling of electronic waste in India. Based on qualitative research, this study shows how the political incorporation of Toxics Link in transnational advocacy networks and domestic governance networks constrains their political agency. The structural exclusion of e‐waste labourers from Indian policy negotiations negates the discursive claims of legitimacy, representation and justice. These incorporation processes create a democratic deficit. I use the insights gained from this case study to provide a critical assessment of theories of transnational environmental activism.     

Antagonistic governance in South African fruit global production networks: a neo‐Gramscian perspective

Governance is a core focus of the global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) literatures. Recent research claims ‘complementary’ or ‘synergistic’ governance, achieved through the confluence of private, public and civil society actors, is required for sustainable social gains. While moving beyond a narrow focus on economic coordination, such analysis lacks a sufficiently nuanced examination of power relations. In this article, I draw on neo‐Gramscian perspectives to account for ongoing contestation, positing that governance needs to be understood in the context of a broader hegemonic project. ‘Antagonistic governance’ is proposed to conceptualize contestation within and across diverse initiatives, which forge, challenge and transform hegemonic stability in GVC/GPNs. I explore this through the South African fruit sector, in particular, a labour crisis in 2012/13. I argue that we need to move beyond apolitical readings of governance to account for the material and discursive practices through which contestation gets played out, compromises are forged, and hegemonic order is maintained.     

An argument for context‐driven intersectionality

The concept of intersectionality has fundamentally changed feminist theorizing and the study of women and gender. However, intersectional research, theorizing, and practice also have been subject to important critiques. This article provides a brief genealogy of intersectionality and summarizes major critiques. We recognize value in these critiques as well as the ongoing power of an intersectional lens. We therefore advocate what we call “context‐driven intersectionality,” arguing that attention to the historical, political, economic, and social factors that shape power relationships and social structures is critical to conducting robust intersectional analyses that avoid reification of social categories and inequalities.     

Effective Techniques: The Career‐in‐Culture Interview: A Semi‐Structured Protocol for the Cross‐Cultural Intake Interview

The authors introduce the Career‐in‐Culture Interview (CiCI), a flexible, semistructured interview protocol designed for the career counseling intake session. The contents of the CiCI are based on recent theoretical advances in multicultural counseling and on the social cognitive model of career development. The authors describe a pilot evaluation of the interview and present guidelines for using the CiCI in practice.