Human Resource Department Power and Influence Through Symbolic Action

The present study integrates theory and researchon power, politics, and social constructionism toinvestigate how human resource (HR) departments inorganizations gain influence. Survey results from 242 organizations demonstrated that symbolicactions are stronger predictors of HR department powerthan unionization, HR performance, and top managementattitudes. Implications of the results are discussed as are directions for futureresearch.     

Vernacularization on the ground: local uses of global women's rights in Peru,China, India and the United States

The articles published in this special journal issue examine how global ideas about women's rights actually get used in four contexts – China, India, Peru and the United States. Our findings result from collaborative research conducted by teams in each country. We call the process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and strategies vernacularization. In each country, vernacularization differed depending on the contents of the global women's rights packages at play, the work of vernacularizers and the different social positions they occupy, how human rights ideas are framed, the channels and technologies of transmission, and the local geographies of history and culture within which circulation and vernacularization take place. We find that vernacularization is a widespread practice that takes different forms in different kinds of organizations and in different cultural and historical contexts. Ongoing tensions between global and national rights ideas are quite common. Finally, our work brings to light two dilemmas in the way human rights are appropriated and used – a resonance dilemma and an advocacy dilemma – both arising from the disparity between human rights as law and human rights as a social movement.     

Constructing human wellbeing across spatial boundaries: negotiating meanings in transnational migration

In this article, I examine how human wellbeing is constructed transnationally. Whereas much attention has been paid to migrants based in the North, how the out‐migration of kin affects the construction of human wellbeing of those living ‘back home’ remains little understood. Existing literature has tended to focus on the impact of financial remittances but the broader psychosocial impacts affecting human wellbeing outcomes have received less attention. In this article I suggest that this gap might be filled by adopting a human wellbeing approach to deepen understanding of what Peru‐based immediate relatives and close friends regard as the benefits and challenges of this migration. By examining how human wellbeing is constructed across material, perceptual and relational domains, this approach offers greater holism in analysis. I also extend work on ‘social remittances’ by offering insights into the meanings that ensure that migration continues to be regarded in Peru as a livelihood improvement strategy worth pursuing.     

Work Design Issues in Lean Production from a Sociotechnical Systems Perspective: Neo-Taylorism or the Next Step in Sociotechnical Design?

The similarities and differences between twoparadigms, Lean Production (LP) and SociotechnicalSystems (STS) thinking, which currently compete for theattention of managers and scholars interested inimproving the design of work systems, are studied in thisarticle. In order to find the logic behind eachapproach, the design principles formulated by Chernshave been used to evaluate LP from an STS viewpoint with respect to work design issues. The two conceptsdiffer most with respect to their definition of systemboundaries, the control mechanisms they favor and theirvalue bases and assumptions about workers. The way control is exercised in each concept isclosely related to the production structure and hasfar-reaching consequences for the human resourcepolicies practiced. Although each approach has something to offer the other, the question whether thebest ideas of both can be synthesized in designing asuperior overall system cannot be answered so easily. Inthe end, it will require more than just choosing features of each approach to apply incombination; the differences in fundamental beliefsabout people need to be reconciled in the design of theorganization and its system.     

Indigenous internationalism: native rights and the UN

Abstract

Since 1982, with the creation of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the UN has taken steps toward addressing the violations of indigenous human rights around the globe that have characterized the colonization of indigenous peoples by western nations since the 15th century. This article explores the question of whether actions taken by the WGIP and other UN bodies promise to relieve this legacy; or whether the UN, as the proper overseer of international law concerning human rights today, continues that legacy in revised form, as some analysts have claimed. A brief overview of positions taken by key figures in the history of international law concerning indigenous peoples since the early 16th century provides a background against which to compare the work of the UN. My conclusion is that while the UN has in some ways sustained the inherited order of neglect of indigenous rights, it has, more importantly, created openings which make it possible for indigenous peoples to assert their claims. While this is not a story of continuous progress, it does suggest that there is reason to respect the UN's efforts in this relentlessly neglected area of human rights.     

Gender,labour and the law: the nexus of domestic work,human trafficking and the informal economy in the United Arab Emirates

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with female migrants in the United Arab Emirates, the focus of this article is on the confluence of human trafficking discourses, gendered migration, domestic work and sex work in the UAE. I explore three main findings. First, domestic work and sex work are not mutually exclusive. Second, women choose to enter sex work in preference to domestic work because of poor working conditions in the latter. Third, global policies on human trafficking that seek to restrict female migration have inspired female migrants in the Gulf in search of higher wages and increased autonomy to look for employment in the informal economy. Employing a theoretical lens that emphasizes structural violence, the article chronicles the individual and macro social factors structuring the transition of female migrants from the formal economy of domestic and care work into the informal economy of sex work.     

‘Bringing coals to Newcastle’? Human rights,civil rights and social movements in New York City

In this article we examine the encounter between global human rights ideas and domestic discourses of civil rights and social justice, focusing on processes of translation and adaptation of women's human rights in two ethnographic sites in New York City. The first site is a citywide coalition working for the adoption of a New York City human rights ordinance. The second site is an advocacy organization working on domestic violence issues. We find that the local adoption of human rights in New York City – the ‘domestication’ of human rights – takes place in two central sites: law and social movement. We further find that the process of translation takes place unevenly in the two sites, and it is driven primarily by the actors, mechanisms and technologies in the social movement arena. Overall, we witness the emergence of a domestic human rights movement as a new counter‐hegemonic space, characterized by multiplicity in meanings, ideological heterogeneity and ambivalence from those engaged in its construction.     

The Enduring Legacy of Elton Mayo

When Human Relations first appeared, Elton Mayohad just retired from Harvard and was at the peak of hisfame. All contributors to the journal in its firstdecade would have acknowledged his already legendary status as a pioneer of applied social science,especially in the workplace. His fall from grace in thelate 1950s coincided with growingideological-cum-methodological critiques of theHawthorne Experiments. In the event, this sustained interest in Mayohimself, although much of the comment on hiscontribution remained speculative and ill-informed.Fifty years on, the enigmatic aspects of Mayo's careerhave largely been unraveled, thanks to theavailability of family letters and other archivalmaterial. A more balanced assessment is now possible ofMayo's intellectual interests and long-term contributionto the field of human relations.     

Female genital mutilation and human rights

Abstract

This article evaluates five different discourses on female genital mutilation for affinities with the language of international instruments codifying human rights: an activist physician's fieldwork journal; two novels, one a Lebanese-American's lyrical work largely indebted to a human rights perspective and, in contrast, a Kenyan publicist's fiction which mutes that approach; an American activist's auto-ethnography; paintings by Nigerian artists in an exhibition travelling in Germany; and a letter to the editor of an African American magazine. I read these varied lexica in light of recent literature on female genital surgery that tends to oppose academics, mainly anthropologists captive to their training, to activists impatient with post-modern wavering who claim that global instruments for women's human rights should be enforced to stop genital torture. Creative writing is instrumental in presenting a clear moral imperative confronted by the complexities of human lives.     

Cybersex: Outercourse and the Enselfment of the Body

The increased popularity of the Internet invites the possibility of repackaging familiar activities in a new medium. Sex is one such activity—an age‐old topic with a new cybertwist. The new technologies of computer‐mediated communication allow us to examine the nature of human interaction in a uniquely disembodied environment that potentially transforms the nature of self, body, and situation. Sex—fundamentally a bodily activity—provides an ideal situation for examining these kinds of potential transformations. In the disembodied context of on‐line interaction both bodies and selves are fluid symbolic constructs emergent in communication and are defined by sociocultural standards. Situations such as these are suggestive of issues related to contemporary transgressions of the empirical shell of the body, potentially reshaping body‐to‐self‐to‐social‐world relationships.     

Human Resource Management and the Appropriation Learning Perspective

This paper posits the concept ofappropriation to explain the underlyingethos and rationale for seeking to secure thecontribution of people to organizational functioning.Human resource management (HRM) practice is therefore largely underpinnedby the objective of appropriating the human resourcevalue. This is ignored by thepractitioner-oriented literature which has a financialinterest in helping organizations to secure this value,and by the academic literature which is unwilling toconfront the contradictions and uncomfortable truthsinherent in such activities. The traditional approach to appropriation is characterized by suchconcerns as skill-formation, commitment to theorganization, shared corporate values, and a reliance onformally constituted governance structures with aputative integrative ethos. This paper advocates areconstitution of the appropriation regime toincorporate the concepts of knowledge and learning. Wedraw from the innovation management literature tohighlight the problematic nature of appropriation and toclarify the implications of appropriation to themanagement of the knowledge that resides in people.Finally, we suggest how future research might proceed within an Appropriation Learning (A–L)perspective.     

Basic relationships between human capital,migration and labour markets in the Western Balkans: An econometric investigation

The high outward mobility that characterises the countries in the Western Balkan region—already for three decades—is often seen as tightly linked to labour market imbalances and persistently low utilisation of human capital over time. To shed light on these issues we analysed the effects of labour market determinants and human capital endowment on migration and vice versa by estimating simultaneously a system of equations that accounted for such relationships in the context of WB countries. The period under analysis is 2007–2019 and the destination countries are the EU15. The empirical results confirm the importance of wage gaps and their changes as an important pull factor for driving emigration. In addition, gaps in human capital emerge as a powerful determinant for explaining emigration into countries where returns to human capital are relatively higher.     

Travelling theory in China: contextualization,compromise and combination

In this article we explore the dissemination of human rights ideas in China through an ethnographic study of three women's organizations: the government's ‘letters and complaints’ department, the governmental NGO affiliated with it, and a legal aid centre; all are located in Beijing. We argue that there are two paths in China for the transmission of international human rights ideas – a government one and a non‐government one. The government path, featured as contextual and compromising, is rooted in socialist and collective values, and the governmental organizations we studied function squarely within the domestic legal framework and the concept of ‘women's rights and interests’. The non‐governmental path, by contrast, characterized by vernacularization, namely a combination of international ideas with local practice to promote legal reform in China, is the result of economic development and interactions with the international community. Both paths interact within their different spheres to further the development of women's rights.     

Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and,Yes, from American Sociology

The U.S. Constitution includes civil and political rights—as individual rights—but does not include what is internationally understood to be “human rights,” namely rights we enjoy as equals, including economic, social, and cultural rights, and protections for vulnerable persons, such as children, minorities, mothers, and refugees. The United States has not ratified any international (United Nations) or regional (Organization of American States) human rights treaty, is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, and is no longer a member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. It might be concluded that Americans do not know what human rights are. It is more complicated than that. While opinion polls show that Americans often endorse individual rights—e. g., the rights of women—they do not frame them as being interdependent or being within the purview of government. Can we conclude that human rights have no place in the United States? Not at all. This article concludes by showing that many U.S. institutions of higher learning have programs in human rights and that some academic associations, including the American Sociological Association, recognize human rights.     

'Land of the free'? Circulating human rights and narrated lives in the United States

Abstract

In the 50 years during which human rights has gained an international currency, personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims. This is particularly true in the United States where personal narratives attesting to human rights violations frequently gain wide exposure through mass publication and publicity, media circulation, and global information flows. This article explores the circulation of human rights narratives in the United States, examining some of the ways that stories enter into public discourse through published life narratives, television talk shows, news reports, campus lectures and publicity tours, websites, and the like, and are taken up by popular and academic audiences, spurring debates within the fields of legal and political theory, international relations, religion, morality and ethics, often far removed from the originating event or site of human rights violation. The article considers the many intended and unintended effects of this circulation on storytellers, their audiences, and the campaigns they represent.     

Swallowed futures,indigestible pasts Post-apocalyptic narratives of rights in Kleist and Doctorow

Abstract

Previous analyses of the intertextual relations between Heinrich von Kleist's 'Michael Kohlhaas' (1810–11) and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1976[1975]) have focused on adaptation, assessing the changes made to the original. By contrast, this article focuses on what motivates the choice of Kleist's novella as an intertext in the first place and argues for a different, narrative logic binding the two. Both texts fixate with great ambivalence on the potential for transcending pervasive difference in the general and common, and they are both post-apocalyptic responses, alternately tragic and ironic visions of transcended difference. Together, the two tell a story of the discursive formation and deformation of the idea of universal human rights – a story that suspends the discourse of human rights between two traumatic moments of articulation and violence (in the late 18th century and the mid-20th century, respectively) that animate, yet remain inaccessible to each text.     

Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society‐Nature Opposition

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society‐nature and city‐countryside—and their co‐identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society‐nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials‐flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolism's raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio‐natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlap's distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.     

Towards a Diagnostic Toolkit for the Language of Agency

Agency—broadly, the capacity to produce effects—is a critical aspect of human activity, yet its multifaceted character makes analysis difficult. Drawing from functional linguistics, we propose a linguistic toolkit for analyzing the degree to which and manner in which speakers represent themselves as acting intentionally and autonomously. After a brief review of relevant agency literature, we propose three sets of grammatical tools, demonstrating their efficacy with a brief case study of 4 adult secondary learners’ educational narratives. We find that our toolkit offers insight both across contexts within an individual and across individuals in a single context.     

Reconstitution of Sociotechnical Arrangements: Agency and the Design of Artifacts

ABSTRACT

This article regards artifacts as sociotechnical arrangements. Likewise, it views the concept of agency—traditionally defined as a human capacity for having needs and preferences and for seeing possible actions—as not independent of sociotechnical arrangements, but rather emerging from and potentially transforming those arrangements. In other words, the design of an artifact is actually the design of a sociotechnical arrangement, from which emerges new agency. We support this view with our fieldwork in the areas of open data, integrated learning, and local currency.     

A feminist perspective on COVID‐19 and the value of care work globally

The shared response to the COVID‐19 crisis demonstrates that the vast majority of society believes human wellbeing — not economic growth — should be at the centre of policy. COVID‐19 exposes the foundational role of care work, both paid and unpaid, to functioning societies and economies. Focusing on ‘production’ instead of the sustainable reproduction of human life devalues care work and those who perform it. Women’s physical and mental health, and the societies that rely on them, are at stake. When these policies are formulated, the field of feminist economics has valuable lessons for mitigating hardships as countries navigate the related economic fallout. A comprehensive response to the COVID‐19 crisis must recognize this gendered work as an integral part of the economic system that promotes human wellbeing for all.