The invisible horsemen: The social world of the backstretch

This paper describes and analyzes the social world of the race track backstretch. Based on 28 years of race track experience and observations and on interviews at three race tracks, I examine this unknown social world. Backstretch workers are charged with the dirty work of caring for thoroughbred race horses and are isolated from larger society by physical, social, occupational, and psychological distance. I describe the media's role in maintaining the group's low social visibility. Dirty work designations assigned to those on the backstretch mask workers' contributions and significantly contribute to the invisibility of this social world.My thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editors ofQualitative Sociology for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Homework and domestic work

This study assesses two competing theories about the extent to which homework—paid work in the home—helps integrate work and domestic roles for men and women. Contrasting male and female homeworkers with their counterparts working outside the home, it supports some aspects of both the resource and role overload theories, but predominantly the role overload perspective. Homeworkers, especially in the working class, experience less interference between job and family life, but perform more housework and child care. They have no more leisure time nor greater marital satisfaction than those working outside the home, but receive more family assistance with their paid jobs, suggesting that they combine tasks from their first and second shifts. Working at home does not break down gender roles in domestic life. Despite time saved from commuting, male homeworkers perform no more housework than comparable men working outside the home. Thus, the gender division of unpaid household labor is not simply a matter of resources or spatial logistics.An earlier version was presented at the meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society, Providence, Rhode Island, April 1991.     

Child Care Work: Intimacy in the Shadows of Family-Life

This study analyzes the relationships between child care workers and the families of the children they serve. Because paid child care operates in the borderlands of family, many workers develop intimate relationships—both emotional and physical—with the children they care for and their families. Based on three and a half years of participant-observation fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with child care workers, the researcher examines how worker's subjective meanings are shaped through daily interactions, through organizational processes found in child care centers, and by the gendering of child care as women's work. The child care workers in this study saw themselves in family-like relationship with the families they served. This designation as like-moms and pseudo-parents also meant that workers continually engaged in emotional labor—managing the intimacy they experienced as caregivers against the expectations placed on them as workers.     

Consequentialist demographic norms and parenting rights

This paper extends the author's recent work on dynamically consistent consequentialist social norms for an unrestricted domain of decision trees with risk to trees in which the population is a variable consequence — i.e., endogenous. Given a form of ethical liberalism and ethical irrelevance of distant ancestors, classical utilitarianism is implied (provided also that a weak continuity condition is met). The repugnant conclusion that having many poor people may be desirable can be avoided by denying that individuals' interests extend to the circumstances of their birth. But it is better avoided by recognizing that potential parents have legitimate interests concerning the sizes of their families.That action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. Francis Hutchison (1725).An abiding interest in concepts of optimality for the choice of population has been stimulated by frequent discussions with Partha Dasgupta. This paper was presented at the seminar on Distributive Justice and Inequality at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, May 1986. I am grateful to the audience for their helpful comments, especially Maurice Salles and Patrick Suppes, and especially to John Weymark for carefully reading and suggesting distinct improvements to the earlier version.     

Rethinking the policy influence of experts: From general characterizations to analysis of variation

This paper first surveys the four principal positions in the debate about the policy influence of professional experts — technocracy, extensive mandates, limited mandates, and servants of power — and finds none entirely satisfactory. While the limited mandates position is the best general characterization of the policy influence of experts, many instances reveal more extensive influence. The papers argues for shifting the discussion from general characterizations to the systematic analysis of variation in the extent and significance of professional influence. A framework for analyzing this variation is proposed. The framework highlights the importance of depoliticization, the framing of issues as narrowly technical or involving the protection of a central cultural value, political situations that encourage the informal capture of power by professional experts or the delegation of power to experts, and the differing level of legitimacy enjoyed by professional occupations, based on their centrality in social regulation.     

Theory,culture, and behavior: Object relations in context

The purpose of this article is to explore aspects of contemporary object relations theory in relation to sociocultural variations in family constellation, childrearing practices, and race and ethnicity. The theoretical framework for this exploration derives from Winnicott's concept of the potential space between person and environment as the location of cultural experience. The author argues that Winnicott's ideas provide a clinically useful way to think about transactions between the internal world of object relations and the external world of cultural diversity. The article concludes with some implications for social work practice.     

Education and Occupations: Reexamining the Conventional Wisdom About Later First Births Among American Mothers

Using biannual Current Population Survey data, this paper reexamines the question of how education and occupations led to the postponement of first births among American mothers in the 1970s through 1990s. Analytical methods in earlier investigations predispose researchers to favor an investment model of education's effects, but an alternative method used in this analysis suggests that college attainment's major effect on age at first birth is primarily the result of years spent childless in college. Mothers-to-be in higher prestige occupations did delay motherhood longer than did those in other occupations. This study extends earlier research by examining whether or not conclusions drawn about all women (with and without children) apply to the majority of women—those who become mothers. The expansion of higher education, higher prestige occupations, and their impact on work and family decisions are discussed.     

The merton thesis: Oetinger and German Pietism,a significant negative case

The Merton thesis identifies two movements — English Puritanism and German Pietism — as causally significant in the development of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. It attributes this connection to a strong compatibility between the values of ascetic Protestantism and those associated with modern science. This article questions Merton's conclusion regarding one of these movements, German Pietism, by arguing that the Pietist ethos stood in sharp conflict with what Merton has called the normative structure of science. One manifestation of this conflict involves Friedrich Oetinger's articulation of a contending religious-mystical conception of science, which assigned a central place to feeling, intuition, the role of the divine, and a qualitative approach to nature. This conception of science, it is argued, provides the clearest indication of the conceptual and valuative distance that tended to separate Pietists from the new science of the 17th and 18th centuries.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1990 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, in Virginia Beach.     

Muddying the Waters Does Not Have to Entail Erosion: Ecological Feminist Concerns with Purity

Ecofeminists call attention to the associations that have been made between woman and nature, which can operate as a source of both subjugation and resistance, exploitation, and inspiration. This paper expands upon feminist critiques of purity by phrasing these concerns in an ecological feminist perspective. This theoretical exercise of problematizing the ideal of purity sheds light upon the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression. Preservationist work has tended to employ the logic of purity by focusing on protection of the purity of the wild regions of the earth from the polluting forces of humanity. However, such approaches retain the troublesome nature/culture dualism. The author illustrates how attempts to fragment and radically separate people from the environment can prove to be highly dangerous. She connects the theoretical resistance to purity to the important activist work that is being done to expose environmental racism. Finally, she discusses how muddying the waters and resisting the logic of purity can offer a promising approach to pressing problems revolving around the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression.     

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.     

Chicanas modernize domestic service

The shift from live-in to day work was a step in the modernization of domestic service because it limited the length of the working day and reduced the psychological exploitation involved in the interpersonal relationship between domestics and mistresses. Even the shift to an hourly wage did not end the extraction of emotional labor, however. Interviews with Chicanas employed as private household workers reveal the next step in the evolution of domestic services. The current development is away from wage work, in which labor time is sold, selling a service in which a job is exchanged for a specified amount of money. Chicanas are defining themselves as expert cleaners hired to do general housework. Most supervision and personal services are thus eliminated from the job. Mistress-servant relations are being transformed into customervendor relations, reducing the personalism and asymmetry of employer-employee relationships.An earlier draft of the paper was presented at the 1986 National Association for Chicano Studies, El Paso, Texas. This research was made possible by a grant from the Business and Professional Women's Foundation and a University of California President's Fellowship. I wish to thank Frances Kleinman and Eric Margolis for their helpful comments on this paper     

The Unmaking of Management? Change and Continuity in British Management in the 1990s

In the late 1980s, a series of reports —notably, The Making of Managers by CharlesHandy-outlined a development path for management in theU.K. This was to be based on the development of aneducation and training base and the model set by leadingcorporations. A decade later, this paper reviews currenttrends in managerial work and employment against theexpectations of the late 1980s. In doing so, it distinguishes between the objectivecondition of British management and itsinstitutionalized meaning within wider British society.It argues that recent accounts of changes in managerialwork and employment have focused solely on incremental changes inthe empirical domain and have neglected importantdiscursive shifts in the way management is understoodand enacted within organizations. These shifts have been catalyzed by the emergence of a series oforganizational initiatives-first, Total QualityManagement (TQM) and, latterly, lean production andBusiness Process Reengineering (BPR)-which aim tosystematically deconstruct management by emphasizing workerempowerment, delayering, downsizing, and theredistribution of managerial functions. In short,initiatives such as these are contributing to theunmaking of management. Managerial groups aresubject to intensification and polarization, whilemanagerial practices are diffused throughout the workprocess.     

The design of organizations and the right to act

Recent innovations in the structure of formal organizations suggest possible directions for the design of schools to bring about high achievement. The structure of output-driven in contrast to administratively-driven schools is described, and designs are described which address both the goal of high achievement and the goal of reduced inequality.An earlier version of this paper was presented as the author's Sorokin Lecture at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, March 1993.     

The Impact of the Therapist's Curiosity on the Treatment Process of Children and Adolescents

Therapists bring their own initiative, interest, and wonder—their professional curiosity—into treatment sessions. Some children and adolescents pull away in reaction to this curiosity, bristling or withdrawing, if only for a moment. This can happen abruptly, even in response to the first hello, but most often it occurs subtly, over the course of treatment. These children and adolescents may be replaying the ruptures in relationships they experienced when they have expressed their own initiative and curiosity to important others in their lives. Therapists need to utilize opportunities to understand the dynamics, explore where the original ruptures may have occurred, and bring the experience into therapeutic focus. Case vignettes illustrate these dynamics.     

Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

Intensive child case management: Work roles and activities

This paper presents findings from a project undertaken to explore the implementation of one rural state's intensive child case management program for families with children with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities. Interviews with 20 child case management staff were conducted for the purpose of describing perceived work roles and activities. Thematic and content analysis of staff interviews revealed differences in staff perceptions regarding the role of the case manager, the ideal work activities of the case manager, and the barriers to achieving the ideal work activities. The discussion focuses on social work practice and policy implications for the provision of intensive child case management programs, and provides recommendations for areas of further inquiry.     

On the desegregation of the visible elite; or,beware of the emperor's new helpers: He or she may look like you or me

In this article an analysis is offered as regards the emergence, beginning in the late 1980s, of a new set of elites. While the desegregation of the elites is acknowledged to have begun earlier, as a consequence of the irresistible demands of the civil rights movement and women's movement for inclusion in decision-making positions, it is argued that there has been an increasing cooptation of the intent of these affirmative action appointments. It is posited that the traditional elites, having initially selected qualified Blacks and qualified women, without regard to personal political ideology, are increasingly selecting more conservative and/or opportunistic persons. As might be argued, for example, in the appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States, these new elites, in government, education, industry, etc., while fitting a desegregating gender and/or complexion criteria, are ideologically closer to the old elites. They are, it is additionally argued, in a domestic neocolonial analogy to the African decolonization experience, to temporarily elongate the legitimacy of the old regime because they may be identified with by people who share their characteristic. The author nevertheless presents reasons why he believes this may be a limiting development in the short range, but a positive development in the long range in requiring a more deracialized and degenderized definition of oppression and oppressors and why this may reignite the pursuit of social and economic justice for all.     

Disagreement point monotonicity,transfer responsiveness,and the egalitarian bargaining solution

This paper provides an axiomatization of the egalitarian bargaining solution. The central axiom used (together with some standard properties of bargaining solutions) in this characterization is a transfer responsiveness condition. First, it ensures that no transfer paradox can occur if bargaining power is transferred from one agent to another by decreasing one agent's and increasing the other agent's component of the disagreement point. Second, the extent of external effects of such a transfer is limited by requiring that agents not involved in the transfer neither gain more than the winner nor lose more than the loser of the transfer. Journal of Economic Literature Classification No.: C78.I thank William Thomson whose comments on an earlier version led to substantial improvements.     

Policies over time and pareto optimality

This paper is concerned with sequences of policies that occur over time in voting models and planning procedures. The framework for our analysis includes assumptions that are satisfied by models in the corresponding literatures, together with other standard assumptions for microeconomic analysis that involve time. The starting point for our analyses is the prespective that results from combining the following (widely held) views: 1) certain voting models and planning procedures can be interpreted as being non-tatonnement or sequential processes (where each policy in the sequence that is generated is actually experienced by voters or consumers) and 2) an alternative being Pareto optimal in any given period (temporal Pareto optimality) is the appropriate efficiency criterion only if the alternative is the final outcome from a tatonnement process-and that, otherwise, one should examine the efficiency of the entire path (using intertemporal Pareto optimality). Our first observation about the planning literature is that is has (by and large) neglected the efficiency criterion that is appropriate for the discrete-time procedures that can be interpreted as non-tatonnement or sequential processes-and that, what's more, such trajectories will (in general) fail to meet this criterion. Our second observation identifies some results that can be used to establish that some of these trajectories will at least be ultimately intertemporally Pareto optimal. In our discussion of voting theory, we review Buchanan's opposition to requiring (social) choice consistency for voting procedures-and his argument for this position on (Pareto) efficiency grounds. We then consider voting procedures that can be interpreted as non-tatonnement or sequential processes and arrive at the conclusion that, in these cases, (i) majority rule cycles are intertemporally Pareto inefficient and (ii) achieving intertemporal Pareto optimality requires choice consistency. We then go on to show that related observations apply to Kramer's normative conclusions about his dynamical model of political equilibrium — and identify some further references where similar observations apply. In the final part of our discussion of voting models, we arrive at the further conclusion that, in the most relevant cases, a trajectory that stays in the temporal Pareto set is not necessarily more desirable (on efficiency grounds) than one that doesn't.This paper has been improved by helpful comments and suggestions that have been provided by Kenneth Arrow, an anonymous referee, and the editor who handled the paper.Peter Coughlin gratefully acknowledges financial support provided by (i) National Science Foundation Grant No. SES-8409352, and (ii) the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (with support from National Science Foundation Grant No. BNS-8700864 and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation).