The Family Movement,Bowen Theory,and Theoretical Medicine: A View from the 21st Century

Important changes have occurred in the family movement in the United States since it emerged in the mid‐1950s. Psychiatry supported the movement in its early years, but that changed as psychiatry abandoned the biopsychosocial model and adopted the biological paradigm through the 1970s. This development pushed family and other therapies to the periphery of the discipline. Medicine is dominated by the biological paradigm and cause‐and‐effect thinking. The roots of the medical model go back to Pasteur. In contrast, psychiatry in the United States had been dominated through the 20^th century by psychoanalytic thinking, which rendered the discipline a step‐child to medicine. This and other factors pushed psychiatry to get biological. The change generated a ‘failure of nerve’ in the family movement, abandoning the role of the family in schizophrenia in the face of psychiatry's assertion that all serious mental illnesses had nothing to do with the family. Other important changes separating the family movement from psychiatry occurred as well. Bowen theory is anchored in biology and evolution, but it is not a biological paradigm. Maintaining solid connections to the scientific disciplines are important for keeping the theory an open system. The recent emergence of systems biology and systems medicine could challenge psychiatry's allegiance to the biological paradigm and bring family systems theory centre stage in the discipline. These new disciplines may also arrive at a systems theory of the individual that can be integrated with family theory, powering a paradigm shift in medicine as a whole.     

Post‐Authoritarian State Formation in Argentina: Transitional Justice as the Accumulation of Symbolic Power

Looking at the transitions to democracy in Latin America during the late 20^th century, a number of scholars observed that human rights and transitional justice had become the central legitimizing axis of the new, post‐authoritarian order. But the question of how human rights and transitional justice measures became such powerful sources of legitimacy in the first place was left unexplored. In this article I use Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital along with Mara Loveman's explanation of the accumulation of this capital to explain how transitional justice came to function as a form of post‐authoritarian state formation in Argentina.     

Social Harmony Paradigms and Natural Selection: Darwin,Kropotkin, and the Metatheory of Mutual Aid

This article proposes the mutual aid theory of Charles Darwin and Peter Kropotkin as an engendering metatheory for social harmony paradigms within public relations, including communitarianism, excellence theory, and fully functioning society theory. It extends current research in public relations beyond Darwin's Origin of Species to include that author's later Descent of Man as well as the neglected works of Russian evolutionary biologist Peter Kropotkin. Drawing upon the research of those authors, the article presents evidence that the evolutionary processes of natural selection created the social instinct that provides both positive and normative status for the social harmony paradigms within public relations.     

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.     

Ethnic Institutions Reconsidered: The Case of Flemish Workers in 19th Century France1

Abstract Traditional perspectives on ethnic institutions tend to consider mainly their role in the preservation of the cultural and social fabric of ethnic communities. Increasing evidence indicates that ethno‐institutional effects are often more varied and complex. France's first industrial‐era immigrants, massively crossing the border from Belgian Flanders during the second half of the 19^th century, are a case in point. Immigrant Flemish workers introduced a new type of institution to the French working class: socialist cooperatives. These would have a long‐term impact not only on the immigrant Flemish community itself, but also on the larger labour movement, on the region, and on the country as a whole. Three elements were important in this process of institutional cross‐fertilization: Belgian workers’ rich institutional repertoire; the coincidence of their settlement with the rise of the French labour movement; and the fact that their institutional innovation was easily transferable.     

Extending the Symbolic Interactionist Theory of Interaction Processes: A Conceptual Outline

This article outlines the elements of a more robust symbolic interactionist theory of interpersonal processes. I argue that George Herbert Mead's conceptualization of interaction processes can be extended to explain not only micro‐level social processes but also key elements of meso‐ and macro‐level dynamics. By expanding Mead's and more recent symbolic interactionist theorizing, and incorporating key ideas from other theoretical traditions outside symbolic interactionism proper, it becomes possible to develop a theory of interaction that fills in important conceptual gaps in theories on the dynamics of micro‐, meso‐, and macro‐level social phenomena.     

Amidst the Reign of Behaviour and Disorder: Recalling Schools as Problems

In May 2013 one of the most profoundly influential books of the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century was released in its fifth edition. Yet, it is not unreasonable to speculate that this newest edition will pass largely unnoticed, even as new diagnoses (and the loss of current ones) seep into the everyday. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM‐5) will undoubtedly be influential in education – defining and re‐defining student maladies. Its list of extensive categories provides, so it is argued, a means to uniformly identify mental disorders. Applied in educational contexts, children and young people can thus be categorized by clinical experts and teachers able to identify an individual's problems, and in theory, respond appropriately. Criticism of the DSM includes debate over its application in cross‐cultural contexts as well as the ways that socio‐economic differences are, to put it bluntly, diagnosed differently. Although these issues of diagnosis do get attention, historical contexts can remain bereft in commentary. In this paper we consider the value that historical perspectives can bring to an analysis of the contemporary effects of DSM‐inspired readings of education and disadvantage. The paper also draws on two projects, one with young people, the other with parents of young children, both of whom experienced disadvantage and precarious relationships with education. In these excluded contexts, people are more likely to come into contact with diagnostic repertoires that originate from the DSM. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem's analysis the ‘concept' as well as Michel Foucault's discussion of Canguilhem's work, this paper considers how attention to school problems is important for disengaging with education's appetite for psychiatric disorders.     

Social and family patterns on the colonial Louisiana frontier

As the pendulum of historical scholarship swings toward the close of another century, momentum has propelled it toward the re‐establishment of a traditional relationship severed by professional historians at the turn of the last century. History and genealogy were inseparable until early 20th‐century humanists elevated the serious pursuit of history from the armchair to the university chair. In the generations since, a chasm of disdain has separated “real” history from so‐called family history in which untrained amateurs dabble with abandon.

Yet the family is the heart of society. To study a people's history without understanding the family structure from which it evolved is to confront a robot and pretend that one feels a pulse. Tardily, professional history is shifting from the “subjects' of broad national interest” to a study of society in microcosm, that is, the family, at the same time that academically oriented genealogists are upgrading their standards to prove that family history can be a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry.

This reunion of history and genealogy has produced outstanding re‐evaluations of society; but in the United States the emphasis to date has been on Anglo‐American culture. This article provides pioneer exploration of the nation's Latin heritage and finds significant differences in patterns of migration and settlement, marriage and morality. Such a study of French and Spanish borderlands in America upsets traditional, stereotyped conceptions of mobility, fertility, and family structure in colonial America.     

I Trust You with My Child: Parental Attitudes to Local Authorities in Cases of Disobedient Children in 18th Century Denmark

During the 18^th century, a series of new institutions appeared in the provinces of Denmark. Their purpose was to discipline beggars and vagrants and to teach them not only to work, but also the Word of God. These tugt workhouses also became institutions for the reform of disobedient children behaving in an “un-Christian” manner. Children were often placed here at the initiative of their parents. The article argues that the trust placed by parents in the state authorities in this way can be understood within the framework of Luther's social teaching, especially his doctrine of the three estates and the understanding of the nature of authority and of mutual obligation that is represented there.     

Organizing the organism: a re-casting of the bio-social interface for our times

I present a future-oriented look at sociology and anthropology's historical appropriation of the concept of organism. The ‘future’ of which I speak is one in which the biological and technological are blending together. In cultural and science studies, the figure of the ‘cyborg’ is often discussed in this context. But the cyborg tends to be treated as a specifically ‘postmodern’ innovation, whereas the organism has always invited the cyborg's ontological ambivalence. This sensibility goes back to the dawn of both the modern biomedical sciences and the social sciences. I begin on the relatively familiar terrain of the role that emerging medical conceptions of the organism in the mid-nineteenth century played in the formation of such founding figures of sociology and anthropology as Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas. I then move to the specific ‘relativization’ of Darwin's theory of evolution that fostered turn-of-the-century conceptions of the social organism, including that emergent entity, the ‘superorganism’, which figures prominently – albeit differently – in the attempts to characterize the uniquely ‘human’ character of culture and technology. Finally I look at one very explicitly ‘constructivist’ approach to the social organism promoted by the distinguished chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, who was in turn anathematized by Max Weber in one of the original episodes of sociology's disciplinary boundary maintenance. The pride of place that Ostwald gave to ‘catalysts’ in consolidating and enhancing social organisms – from business firms to academic disciplines – earns his perspective a second look in our time. I end with directions for further exploration, which include reviving Norbert Wiener's cybernetic vision.     

Economies of sacrifice: Recognition,monadism, and alien‐ation∗

Abstract

‘Economies of Sacrifice’ compares Girard's (1987) Hegelian inter‐dividualism to the Cartesian notion of the cogito and the Freudian theory of the unconscious in order to show how the monadic identity position violates the communicative balance of the self‐other bind. By looking at how both these thinkers constitute an identity category through the concept of sacrifice, the paper refers to the Girardian (1986) and Bataillean (1990) theories of violence and recognition in search of an alternative stance that may provide a more balanced view of human sociability. With regard to Bataille's theory of radical difference we can see how the idea which seeks to attack monadic individualism by destroying all identity advocates a principle of amoralism which views equality as ‘the generalisation of expendability’. As such, through reference to the work of Goux (1998) and O'Neill (2000) the article shows how the Bataillean thesis may pre‐empt the emergence of the post‐modern political economy. In light of this realisation the paper looks beyond both the Bataillean attempt to collapse identity, by exposing humanity to the total violence of the state of nature/post‐modern economic system, and the solipsistic theories of Descartes and Freud, which emphasis the centrality of the self at the cost of an acceptance of otherness, and towards Girard's theory of social justice as a communicative attempt to re‐state the importance of Hegelian recognition and human sociability.     

ENTERTAINING MALTHUS: BREAD,CIRCUSES, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Motivated by the basic adage that man does not live by bread alone, we offer a theory of historical economic growth and population dynamics where human beings need food to survive, but enjoy other things, too. Our model imposes a Malthusian constraint on food, but introduces a second good to the analysis that affects living standards without affecting population growth. We show that technological change does a good job explaining historical consumption patterns and population dynamics, including the Neolithic Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Divergence. Our theory stands in contrast to models that assume a single composite good and a Malthusian constraint. These models generate negligible growth prior to the Industrial Revolution. However, recent revisions to historical data show that historical living standards—though obviously much lower than today's—varied over time and space much more than previously thought. These revisions include updates to Maddison's dataset, which served as the basis for many papers taking long‐run stagnation as a point of departure. This new evidence suggests that the assumption of long‐run stagnation is problematic. Our model shows that when we give theoretical accounting of these new observations the Industrial Revolution is much less puzzling. (JEL B10, I31, J1, N1, O30)     

The iemoto system and the avant-gardes in the Japanese artistic field: Bourdieu's field theory in comparative perspective

The conceptual framework of ‘field’ proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and his model of the literary and artistic fields in nineteenth‐century France are widely applied to studies of the development of the literary and artistic fields in other regions and the fields of other cultural practices. These researches, while showing similarities to Bourdieu’s model, reveal the distinct forms of nomos which those different fields developed through localised contingencies. In other words, their findings highlight the cultural specificity of the cases on which Bourdieu’s field theory is based. The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the field theory can be beneficially applied to cross‐cultural cases provided that its culturally specific elements are clearly identified. For this purpose, I focus on one particular aspect associated with the nomos of Bourdieu’s model – the orientation toward autonomy – to argue for its cultural specificity, which becomes clearer when it is compared to a distinct case of the artistic field in early‐twentieth‐century Japan. My case study shows that the Japanese artistic field did not develop the same form of autonomy as Bourdieu’s model, but it also discloses the processes in which a certain form of nomos was shaped through the struggles between the artistic field and other fields.     

Staging the world in late‐qing China: Globe,nation, and race in a 1904 Beijing opera

This essay takes the first Beijing Opera of China's early twentieth‐century reformist opera movement as an exemplary text and performative context through which to analyze the production of a new historical consciousness in late‐Qing China (1895–1911). Performed in Shanghai in 1904, the opera is centrally concerned with the modern partition of Poland. The essay argues that the opera's interpretation of history is a deliberate intervention into China's turbulent socio‐political atmosphere and helps mark an attempt to popularize through performance a new synchronic global consciousness that links China's contemporary history to the non‐Western world of global transformation at the turn of the twentieth century.     

On the relevance and accountability of dialect: Conversation analysis and dialect contact

The present study seeks to illustrate how the theory and method of conversation analysis (CA) can be used to begin to unpack the notion of ‘contact’ in contact linguistics research. After reviewing language and dialect contact as they are traditionally conceptualized, we describe an additional set of questions inspired by CA's fundamental concern with relevance and accountability. It is argued that, by analyzing the structure and design of turn‐by‐turn talk in situations of dialect contact, we are able to investigate how co‐participants themselves go about carving out the boundaries of their respective dialects, how they can link those dialects to social identities, and how those social identities can become ‘procedurally consequential’ for the design of subsequent talk between the interlocutors. It is ultimately hypothesized that relevance and accountability at the micro‐interactional level may provide new insight into the moment‐by‐moment mechanisms that bring about the comparatively more macro‐level outcomes of dialect contact (e.g. leveling, koineization, etc.) that have been previously identified in contact linguistics research.     

Dangerous Issues and Public Identities: The Negotiation of Controversy in Two Movement Organizations*

Social movement organizations frame not only their target issues, but their own organizational identities. In doing so, they are sometimes forced to make difficult decisions that pit principle against considerations of image. This article compares and contrasts episodes from two different movements: (1) Amnesty International's (AIUSA) expansion of its human rights agenda to include death penalty abolitionism and (2) the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) endorsement of drug legalization. Based upon documentary and interview data, I demonstrate that Amnesty's decision to work toward the abolition of capital punishment provoked intense internal debate based upon the prevalence within AIUSA at that time of a narrow conception of human rights, concern about the effect of anti‐death penalty projects on the group's priorities, and the fear that the carefully crafted image the organization had built would be damaged by anti‐death penalty work. The ACLU's endorsement of drug legalization provoked some of the same concerns, but issues of public identity management were far less evident. Instead, internal debates focused on the proper breadth of the organization's anti‐prohibitionism. I suggest that the differences between the two cases may be understood in terms of contrasting organizational cultures, framing vocabularies, and membership profiles.     

Robert W. Cox's Method of Historical Structures Redux

Abstract

This article argues that Cox's Method of Historical Structures (MHS), although a highly useful tool for understanding the world, should be adapted to make it more effective as a framework for understanding world order in the twenty-first century. The advent of the method helped rejuvenate critical scholarship in international relations and international political economy during the 1980s. It offered a way out of the excessively structural approaches that had dominated critical thinking in the 1960s and 1970s. Cox's method enabled the unpacking of a structure, so that the components that made up any particular configuration could be considered analytically. Providing guidance on how to look at an historical order, and how to consider the component features of that structure, proved to be a revelation for many critical scholars of international relations. Surprisingly, given Cox's highlighting of the distinction between critical and problem-solving theory introduced in the same Millennium article, what really distinguishes Cox's approach, and why it has had the impact it has, is the pragmatism of the method. The MHS offers the possibility of a more closely reasoned analysis of world order than was previously available. It was the practical and somewhat systematic quality of the MHS that made it influential because it offered to facilitate empirical research by critical scholars. Thirty-five years on, the Method looks less satisfactory and this article offers some suggestions for its development.     

Schizocapital and the branding of American psychosis

Abstract

This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti‐Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth‐century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty‐frrst‐century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth‐century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption‐production of commodities, brands and identities.     

Civil Society in an Age of Environmental Accountability: How Local Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations Reduce U.S. Power Plants’ Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Institutional scholars have argued that in the absence of legislation on the issue of climate change, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can help reduce the amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gases being emitted to the environment by disseminating environmental norms. Consistent with this reasoning, they have shown that from the middle of the last century up through the mid‐1990s, nations with more memberships in NGOs have tended to have lower carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in the aggregate. Doubts remain, however, about whether NGOs have reduced emissions in the time since and at the level of individual power plants where the lion's share of carbon pollution is emitted. Using plant‐specific information on CO₂ emissions recently collected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, we investigate the effects of local environmental NGOs (ENGOs) on plants’ environmental performance. Consistent with our expectations, we find that local ENGOs not only directly reduce plants’ emissions but indirectly do so by enhancing the effectiveness of subnational climate policies that encourage energy efficiency. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on the decoupling of normative systems, social movements, environmental sociology, and the EPA's proposed Clean Power Plan.