Beyond Cultural Relativity: The Place of Values in Social Science

Abstract

Samples of three organizations: The American Economic Association, the Union of Radical Political Economics, and the Association for Evolutionary Economics, were obtained in an effort to determine the social forces which create a radical paradigm in contemporary economics. Radicalism is maintained through the operation of (1) social forces external to the discipline, namely, low levels of religiosity and modest income, as well as prior political socialization through natal family political interest and student activism, and (2) forces internal to the discipline and found within its professional socialization subsystem. A structural model incorporating these variables and emphasizing the adoption of an academic perspective consistent with prior political socialization was tested by means of LISREL VII analysis.     

Beyond Mentoring: Alternative Sources and Functions of Developmental Support

Content analyses were used to explore alternative sources and functions of developmental support other than mentoring among nonfaculty university employees. The majority of participants reported that they had an alternative source of developmental support outside of a mentoring relationship, that the developmental functions (i.e., kinds of support) provided by these sources varied, and that there were differences in sources and functions by participant age and gender. The alternative source of support most frequently mentioned was coworkers. The results also suggested that alternative sources of support may provide many of the functions associated with traditional mentors, although the full range may not be represented.     

Cultural workers,pedagogy and the politics of difference: Beyond cultural conservatism

‘Odor di Femina: Though you may not see her, you can certainly smell her’, articulates the primacy of visualism in the history of psychoanalysis. In the first half of the study Mavor reveals how both the photographs of mentally ill women made under the direction of Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot and the use of the visualist rhetoric in the writings of Charcot and Freud were regarded as proof of an always already diagnosed and conceptualized vision of sexual difference. Charcot's and most emphatically Freud's conception of the senses conventionally marked vision as masculine and the others (touch, hearing and especially smell) as feminine. Mavor then turns to Lacan to undo this historically gendered, power-hungry split between sight and the othered senses through his theory of the gaze as objet petit a, which reticulates the gaze and its conventional singular authority. Taking a cue from Lacan's provocative claim that ‘a wild odour emanates’ from the‘function of seeingness’, Mavor pushes Lacan's theory of the gaze (which, she argues, has often been sorely misrepresented in feminist film theory and art history) towards an expanded constellation of the senses. Her excavation of Lacan loosens the gaze's hold on the site of seer/seen, subject/object and, especially, sight/smell. As a result, sight loses its historical pride of place among the senses.     

Career Counseling in the Twenty‐First Century: Beyond Cultural Encapsulation

The author analyzes the context in which professional career counseling in the U.S. exists at the beginning of the 21st century and makes recommendations to enhance the growth and development of the profession. The issues addressed include developing curricula, training career counselors, broadening the focus on career decision making to include work adjustment, improving the basic and advanced skills of career counselors, and extending career services to diverse groups in the U.S. and to people in other nations. Specific strategies that address each of these issues are discussed.     

Beyond Social Constructionism: A Structural Analysis of the Cultural Significance of the Child Star

This article challenges the dominance of social constructionist theories of childhood by presenting a structural analysis of the child star as a recurrent, universal feature in the myths and legends of the world. The article argues that by conceptualising our understanding of children and childhood as being due solely to the socio‐historical context in which they live, an important dimension of childhood may be overlooked. Through looking at media stories about child stars throughout the twentieth century, this article uses a psychoanalytic Jungian framework to explore deeper similarities and patterns in cultural story telling about children over different cras and social contexts.     

Beyond the Interpretive: The Way of Awareness

Thought by itself is incapable of arriving at truth. In fact, thought of the discursive form is a source of our incapacity to know. Knowledge-including interpretation-is conditioned by the limitations of the thought of Western rationality. However, within the esoteric or perennial tradition there is the possibility of an awareness that goes beyond the conditionality of thought. The path to awareness involves a transformation in our being, a transformation which allows a healing of the separation between the observer and the observed. To enter into this realm requires a mind that is unattached and compassionate. In mindfulness-in attention to our oneness with all things-we become aware of things as they really are, here and now.     

On Race and Culture: Beyond Afrocentrism,Eurocentrism to Cultural Democracy

Abstract

The author contends that the struggle for cultural democracy in American education will be critical in determining the quality and the future of education and of America itself. Cultural democracy recognizes the human right of each ethnic / cultural group in a culturally diverse society to have equal access to life chances and sources of social power. Power means to have a “voice,” that is, to have the capacity to define oneself as an active participant in the world rather than a passive victim. Thus, the “voice” as expressed in the theoretical underpinnings or major premises of Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, and cultural democracy is examined with emphasis on their current contributions and future possibilities for shaping higher education and charting the directions in intergroup relations in American society in the twenty-first century.     

Beyond Empathic Failures: Cultural Racism as Narcissistic Trauma and Disenfranchisement of Grandiosity

Applying a self-psychological perspective, this paper explores the effects of cultural racism on a person's sense of self. Racism assaults victims with experiences of being perceived as less-than-human by the social milieu. Such experiences can utterly erode self-esteem and ambition and cause a depression of disenfranchisement whereby one feels abjectly ungrandiose. The paper utilizes a literary example and one from clinical experience to illustrate how chronic experiences of antipathy—derived from cultural racism—can erode a person's sense of self by virtue of the disenfranchisement of grandiosity.     

Beyond Sexuality,Beyond Perversion: The Annihilated Last Scream

Starting with an ancient, dark story from the Babylonian Talmud, the paper proposes that beyond severe sexual perversion lies—buried, silenced, annihilated—an infant’s last scream. This is explored in the theoretical-clinical psychoanalytic writing on the last scream, early breakdown, madness, and catastrophe and illustrated through a detailed account of an analysis with a severely fetishistic-masochistic patient. In this long and difficult analysis, the cessation of perverse practices led to an extreme collapse into breakdown, profound devastation, emptiness, psychic death, and suicidal despair. Working within this collapse in analysis enabled the deep reason for the patient’s breakdown in early life to unfold. And most important, it engendered the crucial possibility of reliving the patient’s unbearable breakdown, deadness, and last scream—this time patient-with-analyst t(w)ogether—and experientially coming through it differently. Yet it still remains without an ending of love.     

Towards a Cultural Analysis of the Modern Family: Beyond the Revisionist Paradigm in Japanese Family Studies

Under the influence of the "new history of the family" of the past few decades, a revisionist view of the "modern family" has emerged among family theorists in Japan. In spite of the significant merits of this new paradigm, I have argued that the failure of its proponents to address certain theoretical and presuppositional issues has discouraged a cultural analysis of the modern family. In recent years, one of the foremost theorists to attempt to bring cultural analysis fully into sociological discourse has been Jeffrey Alexander. I have drawn extensively on Alexander's discussion of Durkheim's later thought as the key to a cultural program in the field of sociology. In doing so, I have suggested that one effect of the transition to modern society is the sacralization of what Durkheim termed the "domestic order". Furthermore, in considering the mechanism by which the central emotional axis of the family comes to revolve around either the parent–child bond or the conjugal bond, I have postulated the existence of a "sacred" dyad—in the Durkheimian sense—within the family unit.     

央地分权与公共文化服务:韩国的失败与光州市的崛起

公共服务近年成为政策重点领域,而央地权力分配对公共服务的影响仍有待研究。本文以韩国公共文化服务项目为例,探讨优化公共服务的央地权力分配模式。通过韩国整体在集权与分权制度下公共文化服务项目发展的对比,以及韩国整体与光州市个体在分权制下的公共文化服务项目的对比,本文揭示,中央集权虽可实现公共文化服务的迅速配给,但中央控制对公共文化服务实际起到抑制作用,而地方分权也不能为公共文化服务提供积极的地方条件,不涉及联动民主化的地方分权是不完全分权,只有结合了强大公民社会力量的联动民主化的地方分权才是优化公共文化发展的关键。韩国的经验与教训对中国有着重要启示。     

Beyond the Classroom:

No abstract available for this article.