Decontextualizing disability in the crime mystery genre: the case of the invisible handicap

The depiction of physical impairments in popular culture reflects as well as shapes public attitudes towards persons with disabilities. Scholars have begun to document images of disabilities (the 'what') in venues such as literary fiction, motion pictures, advertisements, and television programming but there has been less attention directed toward exploring the techniques through which images are delivered (the 'how'). In this paper we explore how the story telling devices of disability—in-dialogue versus disability-in-action and the endowment of characters with compensating characteristics are employed in one segment of popular culture—literary fiction, one genre within this class—the detective novel, and one type of physical impairment—the deaf detective. Our findings suggest that the use of these devices is historically rooted and how they transform handicaps and disabilities into physical impairments thus decontextualizing what is essentially a social issue into one that is ascribed to individuals.     

Detecting Two-Spirit erotics: The fiction of Carole laFavor

ABSTRACT

This article examines the life and novels of Carole laFavor, arguing for her importance to and influence in Two-Spirit studies. Along with being a writer, laFavor was a powerful voice for social justice and Indigenous health sovereignty in Minnesota and the nation. Her two novels, Along the Journey River and Evil Dead Center, which both focus on Anishinaabe lesbian detective protagonist Renee LaRoche, are the first lesbian detective fiction published by a Native author. Renee's embrace of a specifically Two-Spirit erotics anchors her to family and brings her tribal community a powerful healing when she employs her skills to protect her people from instances of racism, abuse, and injustice. This article, then, reads these novels as the first of an emerging genre of texts that claim an overtly Two-Spirit erotic as well as vital precursors to the present embrace of sovereign erotics in Indigenous studies.     

Romancing the Sugar Daddy in Rosemarie Owino's Sugar Daddy's Lover

Abstract

As a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated, the romance genre in Africa plays a series of important functions. Whereas in the West, romance is often seen as a formulaic genre that has run its course, in Africa, it is used to explore a range of pressing social issues. Romantic fiction offers advice and suggests solutions and hence makes legible contemporary ideas on gender and romance. However, thus far, the body of scholarship on romance has tended to focus largely on the female protagonists who dominate the genre. By examining the figure of the sugar daddy, we can widen the boundaries of investigation. This article investigates these ideas in relation to a reading of a popular Kenyan novel, Sugar Daddy's Lover.     

Organisation et institution: vers une socioéconomie de la firme?

The paper aims at showing that beyond its economic nature the firm is an organized social institution. The theory of the firm does not succeed in unifying in a single analytical framework both its institutional and organizational dimensions. In contrast, organization theory – notably organizational sociology – deals with the intertwining of these two existential elements of firms. The cross-fertilization which occurs between these two social sciences can be used to propose a real socio-economic theory of the firm.     

“Lizzie Do You Mind”: Gertrude Stein's Laws of Genre in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

Against previous critics’ readings of Stein's Blood on the Dining-Room Floor as a failed attempt at the hard-boiled genre, this article argues for the many ways in which the novel re-writes the gothic/domestic detective story in a brilliant tour de force that frames all that is un-natural about heteronormative Victorian family life while offering a lesbian alternative. In Stein's subversive and serious play with the forms and conventions of popular fiction, her positive invocations of Lizzie Borden as textual witness, her wide-reaching references to lesbian relationships in other of her works, and, finally, her virtuosic use of silence, Stein writes a profound critique of the patriarchal family through a radical unmaking of a thoroughly domestic literary form.     

DISLOCATING MORAL ORDER AND SOCIAL IDENTITY IN CINEMATIC SPACE:

A certain type of film, the "genre stretcher," is of special interest to the sociology of deviance because it captures deviantizing discourse as if in a moment of crisis. A crisis in moral representation is at issue and with it the capacity for rendering symbolically coherent social action and cultural differentiation through narrative. This article investigates two instances of a genre stretcher— Tightrope (1983) and Cruising (1980)—and places analytic emphasis on interpreting their distinctive persona, the "inverted detective." This figure encases features of an emergent moral imagination in its condensation of certain conundrums, especially the problem of reinscribing deviance in a poststigma surround. The films thereby animate and trace out the implications of a discourse that was initiated by the 1960s and 1970s "revolt against stigma" they function as allegories of the relations between normality and deviance amid symbolic instability.     

Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time

Assumptions about the pace of life speeding up abound in contemporary social theory. While many factors are contributing to this phenomenon, information and communication technologies are seen as the main drivers. This article considers the way social theorists analyse the concepts of time and speed and then examines how these claims might be assessed in the light of empirical research. Such research shows that time compression has multiple dimensions, and that the effect of digital devices like the mobile phone is not simply one of acceleration. In particular, I suggest that the social studies of technology offers a richer analysis of the reciprocal relationship between technological innovation and changing time practices. My argument is that while the hitherto neglected temporal dimension in sociological theory is now being addressed, there is an urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies. Without this, we will continue to have difficulty distinguishing social science from science fiction.     

Social acceleration and the network effect: a defence of social ‘science fiction’ and network determinism

This essay is a response to Judy Wajcman's essay ‘Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time’ (2008: 59–77). In that article Wajcman argued that recent developments in the sociology of temporal change had been marked by a tendency in social theory towards a form of ‘science fiction’– a sociological theorizing, she maintains, that bears no real relation to actual, empirically provable developments in the field and should therefore be viewed as not contributing to ‘a richer analysis of the relationship between technology and time’ (2008: 61). This reply argues that as Wajcman suggests in her essay, there is indeed an ‘urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies’ (2008: 59) but that the most fruitful way to proceed would not be through a constraining of ‘science fiction’ social theorizing but, rather, through its expansion – and more, that ‘science fiction’ should take the lead in the process. This essay suggests that the connection between social theory and empirical studies would be strengthened by a wider understanding of the function of knowledge and research in the context of what is termed ‘true originality’ and ‘routine originality’. The former is the domain of social theory and the latter resides within traditional sociological disciplines. It is argued that both need each other to advance our understanding of society, especially in the context of the fast‐changing processes of technological development. The example of ‘technological determinism’ is discussed as illustrative of how ‘routine originality’ can harden into dogma without the application of ‘true originality’ to continually question (sometimes through ideas that may appear to border on ‘science fiction’) comfortable assumptions that may have become ‘routine’ and shorn of their initial ‘originality’.     

Para-Modern Family Therapy: Deconstructing Post-Modernism

As in the arts and humanities and other social sciences, post-modernism is quickly gaining orthodoxy in family therapy. This paper presents a social-realist and deconstructive critique of recent post-modern thought in family therapy. From the perspective of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, it suggests that family therapy is neither modern nor post-modern, but both/and these alternatives, that is, para-modern. In deconstructive thought, philosophical dualities like realism/social constructionism, cybernetic/post-cybernetic, systemic/narrative co-exist in an absurd double logic. Like writers of literature, the para-modern family therapy ‘puts forward’ a theory or method not as an ideology of truth, but as a play of irony. She/he works simultaneously inside and outside family therapy discourse, open to a wide range of images and metaphors.     

Sociology and Sisyphus: postcolonialism,anti-positivism,and modernist narrative in Patterson’s oeuvre

Theory and Society - This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work...     

Trust and Society: Suggestions for Further Development of Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Trust

This paper addresses an apparent gap in the work of Niklas Luhmann. While the issue of trust continues to receive widespread attention in the social sciences, Luhmann's interest in this topic declined following the development of his systems theory. It is argued that this decline does not reflect any diminished relevance of trust for systems theory, but rather that the architectural remodeling of theory cannot easily be applied to the issue of trust. Here, the issue of trust is reconceptualized as a connection medium. This entails a reconstruction of Luhmann's early theory of trust, especially with regard to function and social positioning. In this context, trust can in turn be linked to the concept of medium in Luhmann's late work. As a connection medium, trust mediates between the different levels of sociality—interaction, organization, and society. These theoretical considerations are employed to develop a more applied framework for empirical research, with a brief case study from southern Italy. From this perspective, the idea of trust as society's glue is seen to be overly simplistic. The common ethical understanding that more trust leads to a better society is also questioned on the grounds that social cooperation can also lead to social sclerosis. Finally, risk and trust are shown to accommodate the formation of different cultures of trust. The paper shows how Luhmann's updated version of trust can inspire current research and enhance our understanding of how trust operates in contemporary society.     

“洋八股”与社会科学规范

随着中国社会科学的快速发展,规范化和国际化的讨论被提上议事日程。本文旨在分析讨论西方社会科学经验研究的方法论范式。通过分析总结国际一流社会科学杂志之范文,本文勾勒出经验社会科学研究的八个组成部分:问题、理论(文献)、假设、数据、测量、方法、发现和结论。这种范式反映后实证主义逻辑,我权称其为洋八股结构。文中重点分析问题、理论和假设三股,讨论提出好问题,做好文献分析的指导性原则;强调假设乃连接理论与经验之桥梁,并分析建构假设的几种常见策略和形式。最后,讨论了洋八股与本土化之关系。     

Going to pieces: narrative disintegration in Nuruddin Farah’s Crossbones

This paper examines Nuruddin Farah’s 2011 novel Crossbones. It argues that Farah subverts the techniques of crime fiction in order to emphasise the difficulty of describing Somalia in terms of a single narrative, and that the novel’s chaotic “unfinished” form represents a resistance to binary and Orientalist media discourses about the country. It demonstrates that the dissolution of structure, characterisation and the generic expectations of crime fiction in the novel represents a resistance to the idea of the outlaw state. The paper discusses the text’s use of rumours, the role and efficacy of the text’s “detective” figures in post-collapse Somalia, and the novel’s treatment of piracy. It argues that the novel’s detective figures represent national allegories within the text, and that their frustration and breakdown suggests the elusiveness and complexity of Somali identity in the postcolonial and post-collapse era.     

Falling into the existential abyss: Ivan Franko’s realist prose in experiments with Gothic and crime fiction modes

This article examines three novels by Ukrainian realist Ivan Franko (1856–1916): Dlia domashn'oho ohnyshcha (For the Home Hearth, 1892), Osnovy suspil'nosti (Pillars of Society, 1894), and Perekhresni stezhky (Fateful Crossroads, 1900). Previous scholars saw elements of crime fiction in these works, but the actual relationship between the two genres of crime fiction and realism has not been fully developed. By studying the conventions of crime fiction, along with its antecedent, the Gothic, and their influence on Franko, the author shows the make-up of the early Ukrainian crime fiction genre and points to its importance in understanding Franko’s vacillation between realist and modernist tendencies. As she argues, the scales of his vacillation are tipped toward modernism in its decadent form, an existential void that characterized fin de siècle Europe. Hence, Franko’s “ideal” or programmatic realism (defined by Franko as a literary style with a didactic tendency aimed at educating society), which he introduced under the appealing cover of crime and Gothic motifs, ultimately failed him. The author proposes that it is the creative modes (Gothic and crime fiction) that Franko chose for voicing his ideas about social reforms that led him, unsuspectingly, away from his programmatic goal and toward the decadent aspects of modernism.     

Looking for ‘social work’ in school social work

School social workers can be seen as a professional group operating on the margin of an educational logic that dominates schools as institutions. This conditions what tasks they are assigned and what aspects of social work knowledge they will find relevant. On the other hand, the role as a sole professional and relative outsider in the organization provides a potential for school social workers to transcend established theories of social work practice. This article aims to investigate how social work theory is applied in school social work. Twelve semi-structured interviews with school social workers were analysed in terms of how they relate to four knowledge approaches derived from the literature: task-centred, systems theory, strengths and anti-oppressive. Contrary to claims within the sociology of professions that social work practice is formed largely by organizational context rather than a discipline-specific knowledge base, the interviewees seemed to lean on a robust professional foundation within social work theory. Interviewees strongly emphasised their role as working for the individual pupil and positioned themselves as somewhat in opposition to a somewhat oppressive school environment.     

Relational Equity as a Design Tool Within Making and Tinkering Activities

This article focuses on the partner-like relations that emerge between undergraduates and youth as they engage in “Making and Tinkering” activities in an afterschool learning ecology, and illustrates the potential for designed tinkering activity to produce relational equity among participants. Grounded in sociocultural theory, but leveraging theoretical contributions from learning sciences and tinkering research, we draw on ethnographic data across one year to examine how the social organization of Making & Tinkering activities provides necessary social conditions for “feedback-in-practice” and consequential learning. Analyses of interactions reveal how more symmetrical intergenerational relationships serve in the design of equitable learning spaces.     

Parenting and the Harry Potter stories: a social care perspective

This paper analyses the capacities of the parents in the Harry Potter stories, written by J. K. Rowling, from a social care perspective. It argues that there is a synergy between what the social sciences have discovered about ‘good enough parenting’ and the insights that can be gathered from entering the imaginative world of literature. This is illustrated by a discussion of the qualities of the parents and parent substitutes in the four books published between 1997 and 2000. It concludes that fictional experiences of childhood create empathy in the reader and enable us to confront the need for imagination as parents and practitioners, while the social sciences keep knowledge grounded and evidenced. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of the Return of Religion on Theoretical Approaches to Democracy and Governance in the Social and Political Sciences

The survey article analyses the impact of the return of religion on theoretical approaches to democracy and governance in the social and political sciences and spells out the normative and practical implications of a post-secular research programme on politics and religion. Reviewing the recent theoretical literature in the field, the author argues that there is a post-secular revision underway in the social and political sciences. This revision leads to a re-conceptualization of key assumptions about religion in sociology and political sciences: on the grounds of a historical and sociological criticism of the secularization thesis, secularity as condition and secularism as ideology acquire analytical significance. In a second step and drawing chiefly on works of Habermas, Rawls, Bader and Shachar, the author proposes that as a consequence of this re-conceptualization, the relationship between politics and religion in democratic theory is best interpreted in terms of a post-secular, deliberative public sphere in which religion has its place and that an appropriate research programme on religion and politics might consist in a normatively informed comparative governance approach to religion.     

Sound,silence, music: Organizing audible work settings

Music is by and large an underexplored social resource in the organization theory framework. There is small but intriguing literature on the uses of music in organizations, stretching back to the days of the engineering revolution, and a body of texts examining the innovation of musical instruments, but music remains primarily a marginal phenomenon in organization theory. Drawing on a variety of literatures, this paper suggests that music plays a key role in creating possibilities for agency. Studies of the use of music in manufacturing settings and in retailing provide empirical evidence of how music is not detached from broader social interests and concerns but rather is a constitutive element in the social fabric. The paper concludes that music and the scholarly field of musicology are two domains to be further explored in organization theory and management studies.