The Commodification of Time in Two Art Worlds

This article examines how people successfully claim expert status in the art worlds of tattooing and opera by commodifying the time they have spent becoming experts in those art worlds. Temporal commodification happens along five dimensions: educational time, autodidactic time, consumption time, contiguous consumption time, and painful time. In essence, aesthetically-oriented individuals can successfully claim expert status in a given art world when they can convince others that they have learned about a particular kind of art, that they have learned from a legitimate source, that they have spent sufficient time consuming this art, that they have spent this time in contiguous chunks, and that they appreciate the pain (both physical and affective) that often accompanies such consumption.     

The Social Worlds of Parents

No abstract available for this article.     

For a sociology of committed professionals: “Art Worlds” in the United States and opposing the war in Iraq

This article analyzes American artists’ opposition to the war in Iraq, emphasizing the way it was determined by their professional situations. Regardless of the networks and political organizations involved, or the ideological dimensions of the anti-war cause, individual professional identities and relationships persisted and influenced their public practices and positioning. In a first section, we compare different artistic subfields and labor configurations, to grasp what, in the participants’ own eyes, made the combination of artistic and militant identities - and, sometimes, the production of a form of “political art” - tenable. The second section concentrates on how political commitment emerged in fields of professional activity, how the functioning of artistic milieus today – that have become more autonomous, specialized and professional – tends to discourage “mixing registers”, i.e. combining aesthetic motives and political logics.     

Virtual Worlds and Social Work Education

ABSTRACT

The introduction of computerised virtual worlds in the early twenty-first century was considered to be an innovation that would be widely used in higher education. There are a number of examples of virtual worlds used for higher education in medicine, nursing, and allied health, including examples in social work. The aim of this article is to explore the potential value of virtual-world technology to enhance the student learning experience for social work education in interpersonal communication skills in a virtual health centre. Findings of a study of Australian undergraduate social work students who engaged in a role play in a virtual health centre for skill development in interpersonal communication are presented. The study findings highlight issues for social work educators to consider when deciding whether or not to use virtual-world technology in social work education, and when designing further research on similar innovations.     

Figured Worlds in the Field of Power

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of how structural relations of power should be understood in local accounts of activity and identity. Thus, we critically review the synthesis of Bourdieu and activity theory in Figured Worlds, analyzing two critiques of Bourdieu: his insufficient localism and his overemphasis on embodiment of habitus. We are left with Bourdieu’s overwhelming concern to explain how the field of power is locally refracted and critique its doxa in a field of opinion, while arguably doing so at the expense of imagination, self-authoring, and world making. We conclude with our own suggestions of a synthesis.     

DaMatta revisited

Roberto DaMatta famously argues that in the Brazilian cultural universe stable moral codes buttress familial hierarchy in the house, while situational negotiations underscore egalitarian utopias in the street. In this article, I revise this analytic construct, which a priori assumes that the person of the house and the “individual” of the street are mutually exclusive social categories. Rather than polarize house and street as distinct cultural domains diametrically opposed to one another, I demonstrate ethnographically that houses in the Brazilian state of Maranhão are conceptually continuous with the street to varying degrees. I argue that moral indebtedness in both these domains locally manifests through the emotional economies of respect (respeito), by which persons/individuals introduce measures of emotional proximity or distance into various types of material exchange relations. Both men and women ultimately channel these types of relations into the space of their family houses, which thus become hubs for the circulation of core social values.     

Characteristics And Types Of Participation In Social Worlds

The concept of social world is given greater analytical power by categorizing differential participation through a typology of social types—strangers, tourists, regulars, and insiders. These trans-situational social types are examined in terms of their commitment, relationships, experiences, and orientation to social worlds. Social worlds are also discussed in terms of three qualities of interaction—relevance, accessibility, and receptivity.     

Researching the Social Worlds of Autistic Children: An Exploration of How an Understanding of Autistic Children's Social Worlds is Best Achieved

Since United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, social research has encouraged the involvement of children in research concerning them. However, there is little evidence to demonstrate how autistic children can be involved. Little is known about which methods are appropriate to research the social worlds of autistic children: adult‐centred or child‐centred methods? Empirical research with autistic children is used to illustrate the contribution that methods which involve children, and methods that do not, can make to the understanding of autistic children's social worlds. I argue while autistic children's participation contributed towards greater understanding, the understanding was enriched for having parents and teachers participate too.     

Inequity aversion revisited

Using a laboratory experiment, we study the predictive power of the Fehr–Schmidt (1999) model of inequity aversion and its robustness to reciprocity and stakes. We find stronger evidence for the model’s predictive power at the individual level than what the existing literature suggests. This finding is robust to stakes. However, the model’s predictive power is highly reduced if subjects can reciprocate others’ actions. This suggests that parameter estimates obtained in an environment that allows for reciprocal responses yield a bias in the parameter estimates. In particular, previous estimates (especially of the disutility of disadvantageous inequity aversion) may overestimate the importance of inequity aversion.