A mexican American woman encounters sociology: An autobiographical perspective

I attempt to show how my ideas about bureaucracy and Mexican American culture are a product of my life history and how I worked out key features of these ideas in teaching sociology at a small university. This was made possible because strategic sponsors helped me as an “outsider” to become a kind of “insider” within that social milieu. Her fields of interest are bureaucracy, family, social psychology and race and ethnic relations. She is currently writing a monograph on Mexican American family life.     

Paying Forward and Paying Back

Twenty years after the conclusion of a fieldwork study, a member of the family that once served as my informant came to live with me. This reflexive account of Ari's stay in our home juxtaposes his socialist kibbutz life with that of my own hypercommodified individualistic urban life. His experiences of working in the illegal economy raise questions about my own hiring practices. In short, we confront ourselves through our respondents' cultural vision. Ultimately, in revisiting a study I had thought complete, this account raises the question of what we owe those people who help us to gain knowledge about their culture, the currency of our careers.     

Intimacy and the Relational Self

This paper is a review of current ideas about intimacy and some ideas of my own about definitions of intimacy which come from a desire for respectful, egalitarian, lively and challenging relationships. I suspect that many current ideas about intimacy are overly influenced by the culture of romantic love, in which intimacy is portrayed as the warm, all encompassing feelings of unconditional love, where never a cross word is said. For me, intimacy includes all those feelings of closeness and warmth, but also those moments of brutal honesty, extreme anger, standing up for oneself and saying no. The myth that intimacy is easily obtained, and always pleasant, will be challenged in this paper.     

Reader's comment: Rural social work and social welfare in the Australian context: A rejoinder to munn

Abstract

The main theme of this rejoinder is that although we are clearly still in relatively early stages of knowledge development, we have accumulated some good ideas, some documented practice experience, some agreement about some fundamental principles, and a little knowledge about rural welfare in Australia. Munn has done us a service in identifying and opening debate about some of the central dilemmas, confusions and knowledge gaps which were inevitably glossed over in my initial paper. This rejoinder makes further comment on some of these. It is suggested that the next phase of the development of knowledge about Australian rural welfare will involve practitioners, researchers and scholars collectively exploring the details of and attempting some resolution of these and other key issues.     

COMMENTARY (12 YEARS ON) ON ‘THE CONTRIBUTION OF OBSERVATION TRAINING TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN SOCIAL WORK’ BY JUDITH TROWELL AND GILLIAN MILES

This article aims to stimulate discussion about relationships between the lives of professionals and of service users. The idea is that when parallels are explored and developed, power dynamics between professionals and social workers are reduced, the quality of interaction and work with service users can be improved, and professionals can also be helped in overcoming difficulties in their own lives. I start with an outline of my own personal background and highlight my development throughout, including my emerging identity as a Buddhist. I discuss a case study involving ‘Sally’ and her family and our work together while I was a social work assistant in a Children and Family's team. I try to show the interconnections between the different difficulties that we faced and how that informed my work. I look at some of the benefits, pitfalls and boundaries of working from the point of view that service user and professional are both working to overcome their problems. I also interweave interactions I had at the time with Carlos, a drug user friend in a crisis and the impact he had on me. Because I include my own situation I have called this article a ‘case experience’.

Throughout I refer to Buddhist and psychoanalytic thinking and particularly to agreement between the two around ideas that inner‐resistance is the main barrier to personal evolution. I argue that faith is the key to unlocking resistance, and that faith should be understood as the development of a belief within people that they are able to progress rather than be destroyed in the face of inevitable problems.     

Completing the Story: connecting relational and psychological processes of exclusion

This paper explores how my understanding of and approach to investigating youth transitions and social exclusion, shifted when conducting a case study about Ray, a mature student in transition from a further education college. Having relayed the findings of a study about Ray's experiences of social exclusion, I will discuss the events and reconsiderations that prompted a change in my relationship with Ray. I will reveal how I began to know Ray is his own right, and grasp his feelings and views about his life, and show how this caused Ray to become a participator in and not merely the subject of the study about his life. This (methodological) reconsideration prompted me to perceive my original relationship with Ray in exactly the same way as I had understood his relationships with his mother, his lecturers and with officials--a relationship between the barer of 'expertise' and the subject of this knowledge. The paper will conclude that the new, closer relationship Ray and I developed enhanced the validity and the richness of my understanding of his social exclusion.     

Missing Michael White: Understanding His Influence in One Person's Life and Work

This is a personal reflection that describes and seeks to understand the significance of Michael White's contribution to my life and work. It offers a personal history of the ways in which these ideas were incorporated over time, and the way in which Michael's teaching made this possible. It looks at how this influence is taken forward and continues to be lived out. It reflects the knowledge and skills, the intentions and the hopes, the purposes and plans held that have been shaped through learning experiences with Michael White and the people and ideas that this introduced me to. The legacy of this learning is a hopefulness for future skill development and teaching, nurtured through these communities of people.     

Neoliberalisation,the social investment state and social work

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the challenges to social work evolving from two major discourses contributing to the common sense contextualising social work within the new spirit of capitalism and the governing of the soul. Beside neo-liberal ideas and values challenging social work values and the welfare state, the question is also about managerialism. To what extent is the social worker able to contribute to liberating, reflexive critique, or exert pastoral power? I have chosen to see how the idea of the social investment state may be linked to Rose’s and Foucault’s ideas about expanding governmentality and end my discussion by relating to some of the early writing on social work’s challenges in confronting ideas and practices interpreted as neoliberalisation moves.     

Freedom Works! The Vision and Broken Heart of Jack D. Douglas

It gives me particular pleasure to publish this review of a major but neglected figure in the recent history of symbolic interactionism. I only heard Jack Douglas speak once, when he gave a plenary address to the British Sociological Association annual conference in Lancaster in the mid‐1980s. The audience treated him quite disgracefully on that occasion. Douglas made two subtle points about the need for sociologists to take contemporary research in primate ethology more seriously and to reconsider spontaneous order theories in social science. His listeners assumed that he was talking about the crasser forms of sociobiology and praising the laissez‐faire ideologies of Thatcherism, and booed him off the stage. I declined to renew my membership to the BSA for about ten years after this episode. I only rejoined when I became a department chair and it was important to be engaged with the professional association, whatever my personal views. John Johnson's paper reminds us of Douglas's important and challenging legacy of ideas, and of the support and inspiration that he gave to a whole generation of outstanding scholars. Robert Dingwall Jack Douglas published 26 books and many articles between 1967 and 1989, and by his intellectual charisma influenced a productive cohort of young scholars who have produced over 70 books and 700 articles and chapters since the 1970s. He combined phenomenology, existentialism, and naturalistic field work to create an approach he termed Existential Sociology, also the title of a 1977 anthology. His thinking has undergone significant changes during the course of a long intellectual career. Following his 1992 retirement, the development of the internet and new technologies of communication afforded Jack a “second life” with a transdisciplinary intellectual community outside of the university environment. This paper briefly summarizes a small part of his life and intellectual project.     

Natural relations: horses,knowledge, technology1

Maintaining the tensions and divisions between the human and non‐human, nature and culture has been a mainstay of Euro‐American thought. Drawing upon two studies of people's associations with horses, we examine how these divisions are being reworked in the social sciences as well in everyday life. We focus on how different ideas about ‘horses’, ‘horsemanship’ and how knowledge is acquired, accomplishes different social worlds. Specifically, what emerges in these differential discourses is that a paradox is put into play to make a distinction between traditional and contemporary ways of being in relation to nature and the animal; it is the paradox of what we want to refer to as ‘natural technologies’. We suggest that the paradox of ‘natural technologies’ is a proliferating feature of Euro‐American cultural life that troubles old divisions between nature and culture and propose that it indicates less about a politics of nature than a politics of culture. Specifically, we show that the preoccupation with bringing nature, and the non‐human, more into alignment with the human promotes ethics and equality as matters of lifestyle choice to the exclusion of very specific ideas about tradition, hierarchy, evolution and socialization.     

Little Theories and Big Problems: Chicago Sociology and Ethnic Conflicts*

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like “theory” and “theorist,” both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a “grounded theory” ( Glaser and Strauss 1967 ). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing ( Rose 1962 ). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: “Exactly what is symbolic interaction”” He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, “It is what they do at Chicago.”     

Muriel’s Claims on Psychoanalysis (and Me)

ABSTRACT

This essay memorializes Muriel Dimen and her creative and generative claims on the future of psychoanalysis. The essay goes over her early ideas about gender and sexuality as well as her keen feminist analyses of the everyday that continue to fuel my own standards as a feminist psychoanalytic theorist.     

Mutuality in Relationships with Health Care Providers

Abstract

I have had a mobility impairment for many years and have experienced repeated trauma at the hands of medical personnel. They have withheld anesthesia and postoperative pain medication, insisting that I had no pain. Physicians have also refused to believe that I have been physically active, and have minimized the degree of impairment that I described. They hold the same biases about people with disabilities as do most people: that we are lazy and weak, and that we do not try hard enough. Despite my ongoing attempts at self advocacy, my orthopedist has made unilateral decisions about my treatment goals and the management of my diseased joints. These have caused me to wear out other joints, until I am significantly impaired and can work only a few hours a week. He then began to treat me differently, since his preconceptions prevented him from seeing me as an individual with unique abilities facing attitudinal and physical barriers. Our relationship was the only tool available to me to attempt to break down his prejudices to stop the harm he was causing me. I will describe a series of oppressive medical provider relationships. I will then demonstrate my attempts to assert myself as an essential mutual partner in decisions about my goals, and show the limitations of this approach in the presence of a great power differential.     

The Unlived Life Is Worth Examining: Nothings and Nobodies behind the Scenes

This paper explores how people talk about the things that have not happened in their lives. I argue that we can perform reverse biographical identity work upon our unmade selves by exploring the meanings of unlived, non-experience. Challenging one's own rehearsed life story is an act of narrative self-transgression, involving negative responsibility assumption. Drawing on my symbolic interactionist theory of “nothing,” I consider how negative social phenomena (no-things, no-bodies, and non-events) are interactively accomplished and retrospectively made sense of in personal accounts. Themes of lost opportunities, silence, invisibility, and emptiness emerge from an analysis of twenty-seven stories. These tales reveal a mixture of emotions: not only sadness, stigma, shame, and regret, but also relief, pride, acceptance, and gratitude. Narratives of nothing are often ambivalent in tone, reflecting the complexity of storied life behind the scenes.     

Reflections at the Waterhole: Black Professionals Researching Together

This paper tells the story of how I came to understanding my practice and my research by means of a metaphor, that of the waterhole. I demonstrate how the ideas contained below have great resonances with the concept of practice nearness. In the process I recount the story of my reflective practices and my research with other black professionals to inquire into our experiences in white organisations and to give voice to our lived experiences.     

Desirable Difference: The Shadow of Racial Stereotypes in Creating Transracial Families through Transnational Adoption

The article analyzes how parents decide to adopt a child transnationally by detailing how the meaning of race is articulated in the formation of family. Drawing from my interviews with adoptive parents, I examine how they internalize ideas about different racial groups. For example, I investigate how what they have learned from the adoption agencies, their own perceptions of racial stereotypes, and their perceptions of the communities in which they reside influence their understanding of race. The article suggests that adoptive parents, when considering whether to adopt children from the U.S. or overseas, use a criteria dictated by racial stereotypes in understanding Asian Americans as the model minority, African-Americans as a deficient group, and Latinos occupying an intermediary position.     

Weaving the Diverse ‘Seeds’ of Knowledge

Inspiration in the journey through my academic career has come from diverse sources and been enriched through continual reflection. The disciplines of anthropology and human ecology have been only one source of ideas. The other source of enrichment is the domain of local knowledge—the product of the local people's struggles to stay alive in a changing environment. Through hard work they strive for improved prosperity and a more sustainable environment; from them I learned the meaning of life.

M. Junus Melalatoa's ethnographic poem entitled Cipayung Petang (1987) in Winarto & Sulistiawati 2006, p. 35) appropriately represents my reflection:

Mana lebih bahagia What makes us happier

memandang petani to see the farmer

dari balik kaca from behind the window glass

atau berkaca pada petani or to reflect through the farmer

tentang diri kita. on ourselves     

Visions in monochrome: families, marriage and the individualization thesis

This paper takes issue with the way in which the individualization thesis--in which it is assumed that close relationships have become tenuous and fragile--has become so dominant in 'new' sociological theorizing about family life. Although others have criticized this thesis, in this paper the main criticism derives from empirical research findings carried out with members of transnational families living in Britain whose values and practices do not fit easily with ideas of individualization. It is argued that we need a much more complex and less linear notion of how families change across generations and in time.     

Struggling to do the right thing: stories from people living with Alzheimer's disease

The information presented in this article is meant not to provide answers, but rather to provoke thought about questions related to ethical decision making in people with Alzheimer's disease. Post (1995) suggested that: among the several most urgent questions of our time is whether human beings have in place the moral and ethical signposts that can point toward a future in which those who are so forgetful will be treated with dignity. (p. 1) Because American society places a high value on rationality and productivity, the life of people with Alzheimer's disease may be equated with hopelessness and uselessness. Thus, health care professionals have a moral obligation to rethink the assumptions that underlie their definitions of quality of life. We cannot know what should be done unless we learn to listen to the life stories of our patients and their families. Perhaps Sherry's comment best reflects how, even with devastating changes in a loved one's sense of identity, one can find ways to respect a new level of relationship: I still feel that he's [Sherry's husband] a human being, and I've tried to ensure that he has a quality of life. When I go visit him, sometimes he slips in and out of being normal. I would always hope that he's still treated with the dignity that he should have as a human being.... I guess what I'm saying is that, even though it seems weird,...there's still a human being in there sometimes, I guess there really is, and it's important to remember that. I can enjoy my husband a lot more now [that he's being cared for in a facility] than I could when I had him 24 hours a day. That was a nerve-wracking experience, especially when there were behavior problems.... He's still the love of my life.     

Reply to comments

Conclusion The comments can be ordered on a linear scale according to the amount of disagreement with my position. Roemer has virtually no quarrels with my position, which is why I have virtually nothing to say on his comment. Van Parijs is also fairly close to my view, even if we disagree about the nature and importance of the non-intentional mechanisms that can sustain functional explanations. With Cohen the disagreement goes deeper, because he argues that we can dispense with knowledge of the mechanism altogether, though I accept his criticism of my analysis of exploitation. Next on the scale, still further come Berger and Offe. We share an interest in the same problems, such as the nature of the capitalist state and the problem of collective action, but we use quite different conceptual tools to handle them. I feel very far from Giddens's position, to the extent that it is at all intelligible to me. Social theory in his hand becomes extremely abstract, without acquiring the precision for which one is sometimes prepared to pay a high price in terms of level of abstraction. Though, at the most general level, I symphatize with his objections to the dualism of choice versus structure, my agreement gives way to puzzlement when I try to understand how his views could make a difference for the working social scientist.