Helpers “Here on the Front Lines”: Welfare‐to‐Work Managers' Moral Identity Work

Using data drawn from telephone interviews with Ohio Works First program managers (N = 69), we examine managers' moral identity work. This work included using militarized rhetoric to evoke moral identities as honorable workers. It also involved signifying helper/helpful moral identities by defining what it means to be helpful, legitimating their helper identity through connections to caseworkers, and affirming their identity through telling success stories. Additionally, managers implicitly othered clients they viewed as needy and politicians they considered to be out‐of‐touch. Our research contributes to the literature on welfare‐to‐work, but also more broadly to our understanding of moral identity work and implicit othering.     

The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class1

White working‐class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that “moral values” played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans’ policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is extremely resonant to this set of voters, and we use in‐depth interviews to uncover this framework. A key feature of this framework, on which in the 2004 presidential election George W. Bush scored high and John Kerry scored low, is the appropriate attitude to wealth, which serves as an indicator for a candidate’s general moral philosophy and as a heuristic about whether the candidate will govern with working‐class voters’ interests in mind. National Election Studies data support the argument that this was a key influence on the voting decision in 2004, even controlling for voters’ partisan identification.     

“I Was Always This Way…”: Rhetorics of Continuity in Narratives of Conversion

This article is concerned with identifying, comparing, and accounting for the principal rhetorical conventions within Pagan practitioners’ narratives of conversion. Applying key insights from studies on narrative identity and drawing on 15 months of fieldwork and 25 in‐depth interviews with Pagan practitioners, I first outline formal similarities in the content of participants’ narratives, arguing that these narrative conventions together constitute an ideal typical conversion narrative: what I call the rhetoric of continuity. This narrative form depicts the process of conversion as a rediscovery or uncovering of a temporally continuous and essentialized Pagan self. I suggest that while all conversions involve both change and continuity, adherents of different faith traditions vary in the degree to which they stress self‐transformation and/or self‐continuity. I then argue that the rhetoric of continuity reflects and reinforces practitioners’: (1) perspective on the locus and nature of the authentic self; (2) claims to legitimacy and social acceptance; and (3) understanding of the nature of religious truth.     

Uncovering a Hidden “I” in Contemporary Urban Ethnography

Considerations of the self in ethnography have taken on various forms, including reportage of how the researcher gained access to a field site as well as achieved rapport with those who were the focus of study. I contend here that there exists a less well‐recognized form of selfhood in ethnography that pertains to the moral self of the ethnographer. This self reflects the sociopolitical or aesthetic orientation taken by the ethnographer of the problem that has framed the research endeavor resulting in the ethnographic product. Through assessments of the work of some ethnographers, including myself, who study people in social categories in which the ethnographer holds membership, this essay explores that dimension of the ethnographer's moral self.     

“Power in Numbers”: Youth Organizing as a Context for Exploring Civic Identity

This study examines civic identity exploration among African‐American and Asian‐American urban youth who participated in a grassroots organizing campaign to improve their local high schools. Drawing on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, the study found that the campaign provided a venue for participants to wrestle with contrasting perspectives about the relationship between the individual and the broader public. The first perspective, which I call atomism, described local social relations as individualistic and self‐interested. The second perspective, which I call collective agency, emphasized that people should work together toward common goals and that the more people who were involved, the more powerful the effort would be. Implications of youth organizing for civic identity formation are discussed.     

“Police,Public Safety,and Race‐Neutral Discourse”

In the final decades of the 20th century policing in America was refashioned in the public image of community policing. Race‐neutral discourses dominate public and professional support for community‐oriented policing philosophies. In the contemporary era of hyper‐incarceration a focus on ethnoracial divisions grounded in the sociology of peculiar institutions is essential for documenting transformations in how the municipal police services are legitimized. Here I analyze how the public discourses of law‐and‐order center on distortions of social fact and public safety. Today the criminalization of immigrants is the latest turn in public discourses shaping patterns of ethnoracial visions and divisions. The carceral breadth of the neoliberal penal state extends beyond social structure, repackaged as race‐neutral ideology across the public sphere.     

That “Every Man for Himself” Thing: The Rationales of Individualism Among the Urban Poor

Individualism is a frequently referenced but seldom inspected topic within urban poverty literature. Residents of low‐income communities may internalize their social immobility by perceiving status to be determined by choices, behaviors, and psychological or moral shortcomings, but scholars generally depict such individualistic outlooks as only a byproduct of more predominant community dysfunctions. As a result, individualism—an ambiguous and confounding concept at all social strata—can assume an especially disapproving tenor when applied to the urban poor, often connoting qualities of defensiveness, ignorance, and quixotic hope. In this article, I draw from ethnographic fieldwork in Houston's Fifth Ward community to explore individualism's meanings and utility within a context of compromised prospects for positive self‐determination. I explain how defensiveness against vulnerability, violence, and volatile relationships is just one rationale for individualism that is exercised alongside other, still structurally framed rationales (i.e., expressive and meritocratic) on the viability of social mobility.     

“Blood,Guts, and Gore Galore:” Bodies,Moral Pollution,and Combat Trauma

This article is based on interviews with U.S. veterans diagnosed with combat‐related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In remembering war, the veterans consistently described grotesque death and injury. These stories of “blood, guts, and gore” were often closely associated with negative moral evaluations of war, which included outright moral claims, moralistic allusions, and expressions of moral emotions. I argue that memories of grotesque death and injury “code” combat as moral pollution, and as these veterans present it, combat pollutes every soldier who passes through it. Furthermore, this classification represents a modern moral culture in which the body is sacred, subject to sustained ritual cleanliness and to strict prohibitions against encroachment by others. A mutilated body is severely disordered and filthy, and when a product of human design, it represents an extremely cruel trespass. Consequently, mutilated bodies are doubly polluted and can code combat as negative in the extreme. This article illustrates that personal traumatic memories are sociologically and historically organized, that the traditional religious ideas of purity and pollution still order moral life, and that autobiographical memory can be approached as a classificatory structure.     

Embodying “tech”: Articulatory setting,phonetic variation,and social meaning

This article examines the co‐occurring realization of two sociophonetic variables within a style—the LOT vowel in English and word‐initial /l/—to explore the link between articulatory setting and stylistic practice. At an arts‐focused high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, the curricular and social practices of students in the technical theatre department centre around manual labour. Ethnographic analysis demonstrates that “tech” constitutes a locally enregistered persona, informed by tech students’ positioning as working‐class subjects through their bodily, sartorial, and technological practices. Tech students also produce higher and more rounded variants of LOT, and more velarized productions of /l/, than their non‐tech peers, and I suggest that articulatory setting is at play in the cohesive indexicality of these variants. I advocate for the continued exploration of co‐occurring sociolinguistic variables which treat the body as a broader stylistic context, and propose that studies of co‐occurring features focus on the ideological processes by which combinations of variables come to index thematic styles.     

All that is solid melts into work: self‐work,the ‘learning ethic’ and the work ethic

In this paper I examine the intersections between a general commitment to education and learning and the moral and ethical dimensions of the work ethic under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on Kathi Weeks' (2011) recent exploration of the work ethic in The Problem with Work, I suggest there is a relationship between the form and function of the work ethic‐ and what I term the ‘learning ethic’. I suggest that commitment to a learning ethic, to the unreserved power of learning and education‐ may reiterate a moral commitment to the personal characteristics that define the work ethic under capitalism. As a consequence, consideration of the form and function of these moral character ideals in the continuation of unequal social relations across educational and workspaces, become obfuscated by a generalized celebration of learning, education and self‐work.     

“Anarchy all over Baščaršija”: Yugoslavia's new socialist culture and the New Primitives poetics of the local

The paper analyses Sarajevo's music movement of New Primitives and its “poetics of the local” as a struggle against the cultural hypocrisy of Yugoslavia's “new socialist culture” and its privileging of “external‐cosmopolitan” as apotheosis of cultured refinement and sophistication while denigrating “local‐parochial” as epitome of uncultured primitiveness. I argue that the movement's praxis is best understood as a call to reject externally‐imposed frames of reference as the basis for self‐understanding, and to embrace a socio‐cultural awareness that the only way to be in the world is to be authentically “primitive”– i.e. to exist as a distinct and autochthon socio‐cultural self.     

Organizing “Below and to the Left”: Differences in the Citizenship and Transnational Practices of Two Zapatista Groups

This article examines the political transnational practices—that is, both the physical and symbolic border‐crossing political practices—of two Zapatista groups. This study seeks to contribute to the existing body of literature on transnationalism and citizenship by focusing on immigrants’ political transnational activities in the global South, as well as transnational activists’ practices in the global North influenced by the global South. I argue that transnational ideological and political influences are bidirectional, that is, influences also flow from the global South to the global North. In addition, I argue that different transnational practices are strongly shaped by structural opportunities and constraints on activists, in this case, by citizenship status and economic class. My arguments are drawn from fieldwork and in‐depth interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area with two Zapatista groups, which I name the Localizers and the Globalizers.     

“I want to move once I have got things straight”: Voluntary sector chief executives' career accounts

This article reports investigation into chief executives' career perceptions, experiences, and aspirations in small and mediumsized organizations in England, using career history and biographical narrative techniques. Career accounts from sixty chief executives—twenty‐seven women and thirty‐three men—were gathered and analyzed, drawing on career theory and typologies of career characterization. A typology for voluntary sector chief executives' career stances was developed: the Paid Philanthropists, the Careerists, and the Nonaligned. Within this typology, women chief executives appeared as predominantly Careerists, outnumbering male chief executives by two to one. Implications for developing career theory in voluntary sector contexts is discussed and directions for future research suggested.     

Sin Coyote Ni Patrón: Why the “Migrant Network” Fails to Explain International Migration

The “migrant network” concept cannot explain large‐scale international migratory flows. This article goes beyond a critique of its a historical and post factum nature. First, I argue that restrictions on its composition and functions also render the migrant network unable to explain why such migratory flows continue or expand even further. Second, a review of five studies illustrates why this concept, the propositions on which it rests, the methods it employs, and the conclusions that it imparts must be reconsidered. Third, the network analysis literature, along with my research data from the Mexico‐U.S. case, suggest an alternative approach. “International migration networks” include those from the labor‐sending hometowns who are emphasized in migrant network studies, as well as a variety of other actors based in the militarized border zone and the labor‐receiving regions. I conclude that accurate studies of migration must include the employers that demand new immigrant workers, as well as the labor smugglers and all other actors that respond to this demand. Immigration studies that fail to do so provide erroneous analyses which camouflage the activities of many network actors, and furnish an academic fig leaf behind which unintended, counterproductive, and even lethal public policies have been implemented.     

“This Is Not Your Practice Life”: lululemon and the Neoliberal Governance of Self

Cet article s'intéresse à l’énorme réussite de lululemon athletica, et en particulier à la façon dont ses stratégies de marque s'approprient la pratique du yoga pour les intégrer à un modèle consumériste de discipline et de soin de soi. On arguera que la stratégie de marque de lululemon est liée à l'hyperindividualisme néolibéral ainsi qu'aux discours plus généraux de développement personnel qui définissent le bien‐être comme un accomplissement personnel et moral. Nous approfondissons la façon dont la stratégie de marque lululemon se reporte constamment à des concepts vagues, homogénéisateurs et extrême‐orientaux des spiritualités du Levant, qui instrumentalisent les pratiques yogiques et renforcent les idéologies occidentales en matière de santéisme, parallèlement à la performance personnelle, corporelle et commerciale. Nous arguons que lululemon intègre au consumérisme des discours de prise de pouvoir, illustrant la façon dont les discours de choix et de soin de soi renforcent le soi responsabilisé qui est au c?ur même des sociétés néolibérales contemporaines. This paper examines the enormous success of lululemon athletica and specifically how its branding practices appropriate yogic practice into a consumerist model of discipline and self‐care. lululemon branding is linked with neoliberal hyperindividualism and broader self‐help discourses that define health and wellness as a personal and moral achievement. We explore how lululemon branding consistently refers to vague, homogenizing, and orientalist concepts of Eastern spiritualities that instrumentalize yogic practices, and reinforce Western ideologies of healthism along with personal, bodily, and market performance. We argue that lululemon folds empowerment into consumerism: discourses of choice and self‐care reinforce the responsibilized self that is the core of contemporary neoliberal societies.     

The Color of Neoliberalism: The “Modern Southern Businessman” and Postwar Alabama’s Challenge to Racial Desegregation1

Prior research on the origins and diffusion of the neoliberal project have emphasized the role of elite economists, yet no explanations have been provided as to why neoliberal reforms were attractive to the broader U.S. population. To fill this gap in the literature, this article focuses on the voluntary sector struggles against desegregation and corporate taxation in postwar Alabama. I examine the emergence of a language of privatization that degraded all things public as “black” and inferior and all things private as “white” and superior, which provided the pretext to attract national white support for the neoliberal turn. Empirically, the article focuses on the construction of the modern southern businessman that emerged from struggles to economically modernize the South, and the construction of a publicly financed private school system that emerged from the struggles to fight school desegregation. These two struggles fused under the George Wallace political umbrella, whose regional and national political career diffused the racial language from its origins in 1950s Alabama to the national level in the 1960s and early 1970s.     

Between “Here” and “There”: Immigrant Cross‐Border Activities and Loyalties

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the prevalence and determinants of cross‐state social exchanges and attachments among Latin American immigrants living in the United States. As we shall show, using data from a recent survey of Latin American migrants living in the United States, migrant cross‐state social action comes in a variety of types, with the direction of conditioning factors differing from one type to another. Moreover, social and political incorporation in the United States reduces affective ties and provision of material support, all the while facilitating other forms of cross‐state social action. Consequently, while international migrants regularly engage in trans‐state social action, the paper shows that neither transnationalism as condition of being, nor transmigrants, as distinctive class of people, is commonly found.     

“If You Talk Badly about Drilling,You're a Pariah”: Challenging a Capitalist Patriarchy in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale Region

Research on energy development is largely gender neutral, creating a need to illuminate how gender structures life in contemporary energy boomtowns. This study demonstrates how gender and the local economy are intertwined to perpetuate a capitalist patriarchy, which structures life for residents in these communities. The purpose of this article is to show that this economic‐gender structure creates tensions between those men and women whose gender performances reinforce hegemony and those who perform gender in direct opposition to resource extraction. I argue that men and women unconstrained by the capitalist patriarchy are better able to challenge its dominance than residents employed in the local economy. I use qualitative interviews (N = 39) with community residents and observations of community events in northeastern Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region as the primary methods of data collection. This study complements previous research by demonstrating the relationship between masculinity and femininity, showing the variability of gender in natural‐resource‐based settings and defining the hierarchal relationship among masculinities and femininities during periods of rapid energy development.