Is there a European social work identity?

The aim of this paper is to examine whether at this point in time the notion of a ‘European social work identity’ can be sustained. The paper commences with some brief consideration of theories of identity, and particularly draws attention to social constructionist identity theory, highlighting its focus on identity as a process. Ideas about what constitutes ‘collective identity’ are then examined. From this, two particular models of collective identity are presented which are helpful for understanding cultural identities. These are the more ‘traditional’ notion of collective culture being evidenced by the presence of shared histories and traditions, and the more social constructionist view of collective processes and action to form identities – whether imposed by the state or generated by the people – as constitutive of identities in themselves. ‘European identity’, and then ‘European social work identity’, will then be examined using these models of collective identity. The paper concludes that using social constructionist versions of identity (identity as a process of collectivisation), European social work identity can certainly be established.     

The Haemophilia Society

Abstract

A popular feminist principle in community work emphasises egalitarian relations between women. The ‘false equality trap’ of sisterhood has been highlighted recently through demonstrating women's different experiences of gender oppression. However, in making experiential diversity the starting point for practice it is possible to overlook power relations. A gendered relations perspective keeps the relations between men and women to the fore, while not precluding relative power differences between women. This perspective ensures that political institutions and practices become targets for change. In contrast, experiential diversity necessitates individual empowerment work and collective action based on local and unique circumstances. This perspective may encourage strategies which are inward-looking and which sidestep mainstream political institutions. Feminist community work needs to be judged according to its contribution to constraining the reproduction of patriarchal power relations. Feminist-inspired community development must operate in tandem with social action, policy reform, prefigurative strategies and above all, political reform.     

On deaf ears: anti-black police terror,multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state

In this essay, we explore the racialised dimensions of policing practices in Brazil. To do so, we look not at the police, their administrative organisation, and practices, but rather we examine the modes of sociality reflected in and produced by police violence. Drawing from a statistics-based analysis of the social and political outcomes produced by the state in its preparation of mega-sports events – evictions, incarceration, and police violence, for example – we identify a nexus between, on the one hand, racialised violence against black bodies and, on the other hand, white loyalty to the state, despite, or precisely because of, a specific type of violence perpetrated by the state on white bodies. Our primary contention is that we cannot understand white victimisation by the police – and the outrage it produces – without taking into consideration two foundational, dialectical aspects of the regime of rights: complicity and disavowal. White vulnerability to this specific form of state violence – a form of violence that is contingent and produces collective horror – reflects not only the disavowal of black suffering, but also the strengthening of the white public sphere.     

Domesticating technology for shared success: collective enactments of World of Warcraft

In this paper, we analyse processes of domestication as collective enactments, using online game playing of World of Warcraft as a case. We study how groups of players – guilds – develop practices and sense-making with respect to the technologies they use in their shared endeavours in raids to battle monsters. Previous studies of domestication have mainly focused on single-actor strategies and relatively little attention have been given to the impact of concerns for particular domestication outcomes, for example in competitive situations or with goals related to efficiency. This paper contributes to domestication theory by analysing what we call collective domestication in a performance-oriented setting, to see how domestication may produce compatible outcomes for individuals that need to act together. The paper is based on a one-year participant observation and qualitative interviews with players. Three types of players were identified – hardcore, casual and moderate – representing three rationales of play: a high level of performance, social benefits, or a combination of the first two. In the analysis, we compare how these three types of player groups’ domesticated the game. A main finding is that collective enactments of technology need extensive managerial efforts unless the group share a coherent and uncontested rationale for playing, thus being a moral community.     

Practicing Birchism: The Assumption and Limits of Idiocultural Coherence in Framing Theory

Social movement theory and research over the past twenty years have utilized the concepts incorporated under the rubric of Framing Theory in order to draw attention to the cultural ‘meaning work’ within a social movement or social movement organization. Underlying Framing Theory is an assumption of what I term idiocultural coherence – that for a movement organization to be successful, its members must come to agree cognitively with its cultural understandings and identify collectively with it. Drawing on an example of the John Birch Society, a very successful conspiratorial, anti-communist organization, I show how people may join a social movement organization not because they necessarily or fully agree with its collective action frames but because it provides an opportunity to act collectively and publicly perform a collective identity. I argue that a narrow focus on idiocultural processes obfuscates important cultural processes ‘outside’ of a movement organization that have an impact on how and why people join an organization and maintain membership.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

Striking Differences: Hunger Strikes in Israel and the USA

Despite longstanding traditions of tolerance, inclusion, and democracy in the USA, dissident citizens and social movements have experienced significant and sustained – although often subtle and difficult-to-observe – repression. Using mechanism-based social movement theory, I explore a range of twentieth-century episodes of contention, involving such groups as mid-century communists, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the modern-day Global Justice Movement. Cracking open the black box of state repression, I demonstrate how four interactive social mechanisms – Resource Depletion, Stigmatization, Divisive Disruption, and Intimidation – animate state repression. A fifth mechanism – Emulation – diffuses the effects of these four Mechanisms of Repression. First I delineate a typology of state actions that suppress dissent. Then I shift analytically from these ten actions to the Mechanisms of Repression, explaining how these mechanisms work. Drawing on scholarship from an array of fields, and pulling data from a variety of sources, I explain how the state has engaged in activity that – operating through social mechanisms – inhibits collective action, either through raising the costs or minimizing the benefits of mobilization.     

Reading dis/ability: interrogating paradigms in a prism of power

The dichotomisation of literacy instruction into phonics instruction versus a whole language approach fails to realise a fundamental tenet of providing equitable educational opportunities to diverse groups of children. Diversity becomes a problem to solve through ‘inoculation programmes’ or ‘special’ education expertise. Moreover, children’s individual strengths can fail to be realised because they do not fit well with the programme of the day. Instead of being appreciated for the value that they may bring in higher order conceptual and intellectual tasks, these individual strengths may be neglected at great cost to the individual child because they offer cheap reward in the shape of aggregate test scores. This paper is a philosophical piece, which in refusing to prescribe what one should do on Monday morning joins other strident voices in disability studies in education to question what it is that we are doing today. Whilst not scientific, this is important work – it emphasises the a priori importance of philosophical, moral and ethical questions – reminding science that children are dynamic social beings who cannot be manipulated like genes to ‘express’ themselves in ways more conducive to quick and cheap educational programmes.     

Volunteering and the gender division of labour: A Franco-British comparison

Cross-national analyses of the gender division of labour usually focus on employment and domestic labour. This paper argues that formal and informal voluntary work should be included in such analyses. Using available secondary sources, the paper compares the gender division of voluntary work in Britain and France – two countries with well-documented differences and similarities concerning employment and domestic labour. The paper reveals that French women, with a higher commitment to the labour market and a slightly larger share of the burden of domestic labour, have a higher commitment to formal voluntary activity but engage less in informal volunteering than their British counterparts whereas French men, with shorter hours in employment and a slightly smaller contribution to domestic labour, undertake more formal and informal voluntary work than their British counterparts. In France, men consistently undertake more voluntary work than women whilst in Britain, there is a degree of gender equality in formal voluntary work but women undertake significantly more informal voluntary work than men. The paper explains the differences and similarities found by considering the role of the state and social policy, the question of ‘time availability’, and the question of what motivates individuals to undertake voluntary work.     

The social capital crash in the periphery:: An analysis of the current predicament in sub-Saharan Africa

Purpose: The current literature on social capital, especially among sociologists and political scientists, is characterized by a focus on its “civic” nature and consequently on the role that virtuous behavior plays in fostering democracy and national development. Robert Putnam’s book on the significance of the civic tradition in understanding Italy’s political history has set the tone for a new genre of literature on development. It is now being replicated, for example in the international development community, where the search for answers to the question of what explains a society’s progress continues. Efforts to operationalize social capital in order to achieve quantitative measures of its impact are also made in these circles.The notion that social capital is made up of a common currency of civicness, however, is both ethnocentric and misleading for policy or governance purposes. Social capital being manifest in the presence of trust and the existence of social networks and operationalized in collective action, which implies the confidence in sharing information and risks with others, may arise for reasons other than those associated with solving public problems arising from the competitive private interests of autonomous individuals, which is the prevailing assumption of the rational choice-based theory that now dominates the literature. There are at least three other reasons for the formation of social capital if the concern is analyzing its role in developing country contexts. The first is class solidarity growing out of a common sense of being exploited. This has historically been viewed as a cause for collective action. The second is the “moral economy” argument put forward by James Scott: people whose traditional values are being threatened by modernization get together to defend these values. The third is cooperation that emanates from the presence of strong communal ties, which help foster the development of a para-public realm, often in conflict with the norms underpinning the civic public realm. In short, there are several competing currencies of social capital that influence people’s readiness to engage in collective action.Which of these types of collective action people prefer and the extent to which they engage in any one of them is very much determined by the history of previous efforts to form social capital. Whether these efforts were successful or not will have an impact on the strategies that individuals choose next time around. Investments in social capital, therefore, are driven by the same considerations that influence behavior and choice in the financial marketplace. Social capital is based on the notion that something is being obtained in return for a gesture of goodwill. It takes a reciprocal effort to sustain it. If mutuality is lost, so is the trust that was being built with the initial act of goodwill. Trust, once destroyed, is difficult to rebuild; hence the significance not only of forming such capital, but also its ruin. Above all, social capital is by nature exclusive, i.e. it cannot incorporate everybody. It is often being fostered in the context of conflict. In short, social capital is not easily engineered by outsiders. It has to grow organically from the social dynamics that characterizes society.The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative explanation of the societal predicament of sub-Saharan African countries to those that have relied primarily on economic and/or structural variables. Using social capital as the dependent variable, it examines what forces produce social capital, what type of it prevails, and which group in society is more inclined towards one type rather than others. Empirical data were collected in Tanzania in 1990 from four different groups—commercial farmers, village farmers, peri-urban entrepreneurs and women groups—all of which are viewed as important players outside the state.Methods: The study shows that commercial farmers are the only group of respondents who display a civic approach towards solving problems facing them. They are driven to collective action by a genuine concern with policy issues and the need to deal with them in a rational fashion. They demonstrate an internal strength that is unparalleled in the other groups. Women groups show great internal solidarity, but their motive for joint action is largely driven by moral economy considerations, that is, the desire to protect or enhance traditional values. Moreover, their activities tend to be confined to very elementary livelihood issues and thus have little impact on the nature of the public realm. Village farmers, and to a lesser extent, peri-urban entrepreneurs, are primarily motivated by communal considerations, but unlike the other two groups, they display much less trust in each other. There is a serious crisis of confidence in the value of collective action among both village farmers and peri-urban entrepreneurs, but this does not mean that they are transcending communal loyalties in favor of some other type of collective action. On the contrary, they refrain from any collective action and prefer to act on their own to solve problems, many of which cannot be dealt with on such a basis.In explaining this loss in social capital that is so prevalent among groups that could play a crucial role in national development it is necessary to understand the political legacy that they are coping with. Policies that took away the spirit of self-reliance and self-help that was so prominent before and at independence among groups at both national and local levels by emphasizing the need for a centralized control of resource allocation and thus the preemption of voluntary action are according to respondents largely responsible for the destruction of social capital in Tanzania. The loss in Tanzania is a double one. It is not only the formal institutions which have collapsed but so have the informal networks that in many other countries may serve as a substitute to facilitate collective action. It is clear that the loss of trust in the Tanzanian countryside and its urban fringes has produced a general decline in social capital both at the micro and macro level. Individuals do not trust their neighbors to engage in solving many problems that are of a common nature. They instead rely on their own limited resources, typically what may be possible to mobilize within a narrow family setting. These resources are typically inadequate and problems of a common and public nature in the field of health, education and infrastructure remain unsolved. At the societal level there is a more generalized loss of social capital, which expresses itself in terms of a broad suspicion towards government as well as other modernizing institutions. Religious institutions which are often viewed as alternative trustworthy institutions and thus potentially of value for local development purposes have lost much of their public role. Instead, people flock to the “new” churches, often evangelical or prophetic institutions where salvation is being sought in an escapist manner. In sum, the negative externalities produced by the loss of trust in institutions and among people in Tanzania are very serious and are likely to be at the root of the country’s predicament as the only country in the world which without experiencing war, epidemics or a financial crash has plunged from being economically relatively well-off to being one of the world’s five poorest nations.Results: This study has important policy implications for what kind of “interventions” outside agencies or domestic actors in Tanzania may take. It is clear that the only group with enough internal strength to make a difference are the commercial farmers, who articulate a very “civic” outlook and reflect the type of rational calculations that we associate with game theoretic reasoning. Even if augmented with other members of the middle class, however, this group is quite small and it is difficult to see that it can carry the burdens of their country on their shoulders alone. Furthermore, if they were to become politically more active, they may easily be tainted by the “patrimonial” type of politics that still dominates Tanzania (and many other countries). Nonetheless, the commercial farmers have a potentially important contribution to make to economic development in the country. The marginalization of women means that human and social capital in the country is being wasted or misused. Greater efforts must be made to enhance the access that women have to public resources and to participation in public affairs.The loss of trust in both formal and informal institutions means that Tanzania poses an interesting challenge in terms of where to start rebuilding social capital. Accepting that it will not be an easy task, it may be that the weakness of informal networks provides an opportunity for giving priority attention to building up formal institutions that can make a difference. The judiciary is a case in point. Its upper echelons are already quite reliable and trusted, but its lower level judges are still easily corrupted and often operating in a manner that is detrimental to the cause of rule of law. To ensure a fairer resource allocation it may also be necessary to consider establishing alternative mechanisms to those controlled by the executive, because government operations tend to be based solely on patronage considerations. The model of autonomous development funds that is now being promoted in various African countries that supplement government expenditures is of special relevance in the current situation in countries like Tanzania.Conclusion: In conclusion, this paper draws attention to the need for acknowledging that games that people play are not only explained in conventional prisoner dilemma terms but need to be extended to consideration of games where the basis for choice is not only cognition but affection. Games based on affection tend to be exclusively zero-sum games, which ruin social capital much more quickly than cognitive games that offer the prospect of a positive-sum end to the game. Much of Africa’s societal predicament, therefore, can be explained with reference not only to social capital in general terms but also to the particular type of social capital that prevails and the type of “game” it gives rise to as people interact to deal with issues facing them as common problems. Especially problematic in Africa is that affective games are very inefficient in resolving disputes within groups or organizations. The notion of tit-for-tat that can be turned into a positive-sum game in the context of cognition-based or rational types of prisoners’ dilemma situations typically leads to either confrontation or withdrawal in the case of affective games. The tit-for-tat remains a pure zero-sum game where “retreat-for-tat” is often preferred as a way of avoiding embarrassment. As political scientists and sociologists are striving to strengthen the theoretical core of their respective disciplines, the presence of games that are played on a different bases than those conventionally modeled in game theory provides a challenge that at least those who are interested in comparative studies cannot escape.     

The Gender Wage Gap in the United States and Cross Nationally

Scholarship in sociology and economics has long explored the gender wage gap. Recent research suggests that these inequalities are indicative of important differences not only between men and women, but among women and men, reflecting rising levels of income inequality among workers in the post‐industrial era. We argue that the most interesting debates in the gender wage gap – those exploring differences among subgroups by class, race, and/or parenthood status (such as the motherhood wage penalty), as well as those considering differences across countries – can bring new insights to the study of wage inequality, as well as to understandings of what drives gendered wage inequality.     

Genocide as Contentious Politics

Despite a recent turn towards the study of political violence within the field of contentious politics, scholars have yet to focus their lens on genocide. This is puzzling, as the field of collective action and social movements was originally developed in reaction to fascism (Nazism in particular), while research on collective action and research on genocide has long shown parallel findings and shared insights. This paper reviews the history of this scholarly convergence and divergence, and suggests that recent findings of research on genocide can be improved by the consideration of concepts from social movements and collective action. It then details three theories of the micro‐mechanisms that mobilize individuals for contention – framing, diffusion, and networks – and specifies how they refine existing explanations of civilian participation in genocide. In the conclusion, I suggest that a contentious politics approach to genocide would consider it one form of collective action among others, analyzable within the existing framework of collective action and social movement theory.     

Masses,Crowds, Communities,Movements: Collective Action in the Internet Age

This article investigates two questions: One, how might the very differently structured social collectives on the Internet – masses, crowds, communities and movements – be classified and distinguished? And two, what influence do the technological infrastructures in which they operate have on their formation, structure, and activities? For this, we differentiate between two main types of social collectives: non-organized collectives, which exhibit loosely coupled collective behavior, and collective actors with a separate identity and strategic capability. Further, we examine the newness, or distinctive traits, of online-based collectives, which we identify as being the strong and hitherto non-existent interplay between the technological infrastructures that these collectives are embedded in and the social processes of coordination and institutionalization they must engage in, in order to maintain their viability over time. Conventional patterns of social dynamics in the development and stabilization of collective action are now systematically intertwined with technology-induced processes of structuration.     

Why do men get more heart disease than women? An international perspective

Biological, behavioral, and psychosocial contributions to the gender gap in coronary heart disease (CHD) are discussed. Although CHD is the Number 1 cause of death for both sexes in the industrialized world, CHD mortality rates between these countries are larger than those between men and women, suggesting that biological factors are not the sole influences on the gender gap in CHD. Traditional coronary risk factors cannot explain the rapid increase in CHD mortality among middle-aged men in many of the newly independent states of eastern Europe. However, eastern European men score higher on stress-related psychosocial coronary risk factors (e.g., social isolation, vital exhaustion) than men living in the West. Comparisons between the sexes also reveal gender differences in psychosocial and behavioral coronary risk factors, including excessive alcohol consumption and smoking, favoring women. Overall, it appears that men's coping with stressful events may be less adaptive physiologically, behaviorally, and emotionally, contributing to their increased risk for CHD.     

The meanings of migration,remittances and gifts: views of Honduran women who stay

In this article we examine the non‐economic, emotional meanings that men's economic migration has for the wives and mothers who stay in two rural communities in Honduras. Combining the literature on economic sociology and on the social meanings of relations within transnational families, we identify three areas that allow us to capture what the men's migration means for the women who stay – communication between the non‐migrant women and migrant men, stress and anxiety in women's personal lives, and added household responsibilities. Through interviews with 18 non‐migrant mothers and wives and qualitative fieldwork in Honduras, we find that women's interpretations of men's migration are not simple, black‐and‐white assessments. Instead, these are multifaceted and shaped by the social milieu in which the women live. Whereas the remittances and gifts that the men send improve the lives of the women and their families, these transfers also convey assurances that the men have not forgotten them and they become expressions of love.     

In credit we trust: Building social capital by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh

In this paper we examine how a third-party – Grameen Bank in Bangladesh – created social capital that has been a boon to the explosive growth of Microfinance in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Using Putnam's definition, we show how Grameen Bank created social capital by forming horizontal and vertical networks, establishing new norms and fostering a new level of social trust to solve the collective action problems of poor people's access to capital. The fact that a Microfinance Institution (MFI) can create social capital has strong policy implications. Since social capital is a public good – non-excludable and non-rivalrous – the market will underprovide such good. This paper shows that Microfinance corrects another type of market failure—under provision of a public good, in addition to correcting the failure of the credit market. The social capital building aspects of an MFI need to be taken into account in the whole debate about the need for subsidy.     

Survivors of Woman Abuse

Abstract

The feminist social work and related literature on abused women has focused on women's processes of empowerment but has overlooked the question of women's movement from individual survival to collective resistance. In this feminist qualitative study, I explore the processes through which survivors of abuse by male partners become involved in collective action for social change. Using story telling as a research method, I interviewed 11 women about the processes, factors, insights, and events that prompted them to act collectively to address violence against women. I found that women's movement from individual survival to collective action entails significant changes in consciousness and subjectivity. Women's processes of conscientization are complex, contradictory and often painful because they involve political and psychic dimensions of subjectivity, protracted struggles with contradictions and conflict, and resistance to knowledge that threatens to unsettle relatively stable notions of identity. I suggest that feminist social work theory and practice must take into account three interrelated elements of women's transformative journeys: the discursive and material conditions that facilitate women's movement to collective action; the social, material and psychic costs of women's growth; and the multifaceted and difficult nature of women's journey in recognizing and naming abuse, making sense of their experiences, and acting on this knowledge to work for change. I recommend that feminist social work practice with survivors recognize that survivors can and do contribute to social change, and develop new, more inclusive liberatory models of working with survivors of abuse.     

Results of a Heart Disease Risk-Factor Screening Among Traditional College Students

Abstract

Biological, behavioral, and psychosocial contributions to the gender gap in coronary heart disease (CHD) are discussed. Although CHD is the Number 1 cause of death for both sexes in the industrialized world, CHD mortality rates between these countries are larger than those between men and women, suggesting that biological factors are not the sole influences on the gender gap in CHD. Traditional coronary risk factors cannot explain the rapid increase in CHD mortality among middle-aged men in many of the newly independent states of eastern Europe. However, eastern European men score higher on stress-related psychosocial coronary risk factors (eg, social isolation, vital exhaustion) than men living in the West. Comparisons between the sexes also reveal gender differences in psychosocial and behavioral coronary risk factors, including excessive alcohol consumption and smoking, favoring women. Overall, it appears that men's coping with stressful events may be less adaptive physiologically, behaviorally, and emotionally, contributing to their increased risk for CHD.     

Social Identity and its Influence on Women's Roles in East-Central Europe

An apparent drop in women's presence in the political sphere has spawned debates in the feminist literature over the need and cultural appropriateness of women's political office-holding in East-Central Europe. The author discusses the nature of political participation in light of women's self-definition, social identity, and loci of commitments in these transforming states. Taking their own value orientations and the societal processes they experience as a baseline from which to appraise political and social change, women in East-Central Europe feel disillusioned with the transition to a market economy and the ideological framework out of which it functions. They have, after all, disproportionately borne the ill-effects of the new ideology of efficiency and productivity in the workforce and they perceive the political arena as a narrowly defined arena of partisan rancoring that does not address their needs. Pointing to Dahl's work on moral civic virtue, the author argues that the orientation and values of women in East-Central Europe – i.e. a commitment to justice and preference for localized, pragmatic (not ideological) and particularistic action – are especially conducive to developing the moral civic infrastructure so badly needed in these transitioning countries. The author discusses the merits and drawbacks of three possible scenarios for action for the women of this region: maintaining the status quo; using women's traditional and preferred forms of action to effect change 'from the bottom'; and taking frontal action at the national level against inequities and discriminatory policies.     

Social Movement Strategy,Tactics, and Collective Identity1

Tactical choices and their execution are closely related to the construction of collective identities in social movements. Studying collective identity has helped scholars understand why people participate in collective action, but the array of tactics that constitute action has not been fully explored. An emerging interest in culture and strategy that situates social movement actors in a field of contention with opponents, allies, and bystanding publics raises questions about the tactics that are used and the construction of collective identity, which is formed in interaction with others. Strategies and tactics reflect collective identities but also provide opportunities for reaffirming or challenging them. Innovative methods can create tension as activists work to resolve what they do with who they feel they are. Conflict studies, nonviolent action studies, and sociological research using concepts such as framing, discourse, protest events, and tactical repertoires offer tools with which to bridge tactics and collective identity.