Social inequality and the sociology of work and occupations

Although occupation for a long time played a central role in sociological research on inequality, today it is only one topic among others. In spite of this development, this article asks whether sociology has abandoned the topic of occupation too soon. Based on a theory of functional differentiation supplemented with some arguments concerning the sociological concepts of stratification and individualization, this article presents a new possibility of analysing the problem of social inequality focusing on the forms occupation and organization in modern society.     

Public Relations and Chinese Modernity: A 21st-Century Perspective

ABSTRACT

This study approaches the history of China's public relations (PR) industry from the perspective of modernity. Coupled with China's modern transformation and modernization since the late 1970s, Chinese PR industry and practitioners sought to establish legitimacy in the following 30 years. Three developmental stages are identified: Introduction and Enlightenment (1978–1992), Marketization and Professionalization (1992–2003), and Diversification (2003–present). In each stage, the theme and practice of PR interplayed with China's modernization and modern transformation. Situated under unique political, economic, and social contexts, China's PR faced, and is still facing, crises in reputation, utility, social values, identity, legitimacy, and professional ethics.     

Public-private partnerships: How institutional linkages help to build organizational legitimacy in an international environment

Gaining legitimacy in their host country environment is a key priority for multinational corporations’ public relations efforts since it secures their local social license to operate. By applying neo-institutional public relations to corporate diplomacy, this paper argued that institutional linkages between corporations and local government could enhance the building of legitimacy. The study sought to determine whether institutional relations affect the perception of organizational legitimacy, focusing on the United Arab Emirates. In non-democratic countries, public relations tends to be perceived as less sophisticated, and legitimacy becomes even more critical for foreign corporations. Therefore, a one-factorial (corporate diplomacy with/ without governmental involvement) between-subjects experimental design study surveying a representative sample of residents in the United Arab Emirates (N = 199) was conducted. The results imply that corporate diplomacy with governmental linkages leads to a higher perception of moral, pragmatic, and regulative organizational legitimacy, partially mediated by media credibility, governmental legitimacy, and issue legitimacy.     

Equality and Inequality in Modern Society, or Social Stratification Revisited

This paper attempts both to "bring up to date" the author's conception of social stratification as set forth in two previous general papers written in 1940 and 1953, and to broaden the field of consideration by giving special attention to the forces pressing toward equality in various respects, as well as the bases of inequality. The position taken is that the erosion of the legitimacy of the traditional bases of inequality has brought to a new level of prominence value-commitment to an essential equality of status of all members of modern societal communities.
Inequalities, among units of societal structure which are essential in such fields as economic productivity, authority and power, and culturally based competence, must be justified in terms of their contribution to societal functioning. The balancing of the respects in which all members of the societal community and many of its collective subunits must be held to be equal with the imperatives of inequality constitutes one of the primary foci of the problem of integration in modern society. A few suggestions about the mechanisms by which this integrative process can operate are presented.     

Union Legitimacy and the Team Concept: A Case Study of Workers’ Attitudes*

Unions are facing a crisis of legitimacy resulting in part from employer‐initiated workplace participation programs that seek to undermine labor militancy and attachment to unions. The overall trend among union leaders, however, is support for the team concept when implemented in unionized settings. This study examines the effect of union involvement in the team concept on pragmatic and moral union legitimacy at the first unionized team concept assembly plant in the automobile industry—the General Motors’ truck plant in Shreveport, Louisiana. The unique contribution of the study is that it systematically examines how workers who began their careers in the industry under different production regimes view the team concept and union legitimacy. The analysis is based on a random sample survey of workers and employs an original approach of comparing work attitudes and union legitimacy among different “political cohorts.” The results indicate that the team concept threatens pragmatic union legitimacy for veteran workers because it undermines seniority rights. Significant time working under the team concept may also weaken moral union legitimacy, even among workers socialized initially in nonteam concept environments.     

NGOs’ transnational advocacy networks: from ‘legitimacy’ to ‘political responsibility’?

NGOs that operate as part of transnational advocacy networks face a number of ‘legitimacy challenges’ concerning their rights to participate in the shaping of global governance. Outlining the legitimacy claims that development NGOs make, the article argues that ‘legitimacy’ is a socially constructed quality that may be ascribed to an NGO by actors and stakeholders with different viewpoints. NGOs operating transnationally link disparate communities and conceptions of legitimacy, and undermine the discourse and practice of sovereignty. Therefore such NGOs will find it difficult to be universally regarded as legitimate, especially by states that hold a sovereignty‐based conception of legitimacy. However, relationships are the building blocks of networks, and efforts to improve them should not be abandoned simply because ‘legitimacy’ is too closely connected with sovereignty. In particular, NGOs ought to improve their relationships with the poor and marginalized communities whose interests they claim to promote. To this end, the concept of ‘political responsibility’ is suggested as a pragmatic approach to understanding power relations as they arise in transnational advocacy networks and campaigns.     

Situated legitimacy: Deliberative arenas and the new rural governance

Rural governance in the UK and elsewhere has undergone far-reaching changes, as partnerships and other collaborative approaches have emerged to address the challenges of rural sustainable development. The legitimacy of this ‘new rural governance’ is purportedly grounded in deliberation between stakeholders, but this is problematic—it is not clear how ‘legitimacy’ is to be understood now that the criteria of legitimacy appropriate to representative democratic government are not obviously applicable.Here we propose an analysis of legitimacy as situated—that is, given meanings by actors in specific contexts—and continuously constructed through discursive processes, where it also plays a reciprocal, highly political role in shaping those processes. We use this framework to analyse decision making in three distinctive deliberative arenas for sustainable transport policy making in the Peak District National Park in England. Legitimacy claims were found to be significant elements in each arena, but no single, overriding legitimacy discourse was successfully established. Instead, each arena's legitimacy was a hybrid, justified through a complex mix of competing rationales.While no single conclusion can be drawn about the legitimacy of ‘the new rural governance’, the strongest legitimising principles remained those grounded in representative democracy. In contrast, the ‘new’ approaches rely on deliberative norms accepted only by (some of) the relatively limited circle of stakeholders directly involved. More generally, if such norms are to become accepted principles for legitimate rural governance, then more work is needed to discursively establish their acceptability both in networks of governance and with the wider population.     

Civil Society,Legitimacy and Political Space: Why Some Organisations are More Vulnerable to Restrictions than Others in Violent and Divided Contexts

This paper examines legitimacy and political space for civil society in violent and divided contexts. It draws on qualitative fieldwork with civil society groups in Burundi, where government restrictions and political violence have increased in recent years. However, not all civil society groups experienced these pressures in the same way, and some were more vulnerable to restrictions than others. This paper asks why and considers whether civil society legitimacy can help to explain some of these differences. In doing so, it develops a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between legitimacy and political space, and processes of legitimation and delegitimation in violent and divided contexts. The paper finds that the experiences of civil society groups in Burundi prior to the 2015 elections not only related to their organisational legitimacy, but also the extent to which they were perceived to challenge the political legitimacy of government elites.     

Labor force participation and fertility: a study of married women in Bangladesh

Most researchers support the notion that a direct negative relationship exists between married women's labor force participation and fertility behavior, yet female employment shows no consistent, general relationship with declining fertility at individual and societal levels. Specific conditions under which employment lowers fertility are therefore explored for the case of Bangladesh. The economic, sociological, and world-system theoretical approaches to the relationship and empirical studies in developing countries including Bangladesh are reviewed. 1975-76 Bangladesh Fertility Survey data on births, deaths, nuptiality, and family planning knowledge and practice for 5772 currently married women of 6513 ever married women under 50 sampled are subjected to multivariate analysis for the study. Analysis revealed that women's modern and traditional occupation as well as higher and secondary education significantly lower their fertility, and that higher age, Islamic religion, use of modern contraceptives, and husband's occupation in transitional and modern sectors have significant positive effects on fertility. The correlation between higher fertility and contraceptive use may be due to women's delay in practicing family planning until reaching desired parity and/or high infant mortality driving women to cease practice in order to replace lost offspring. Future research should be conducted with larger samples and also consider occupations of both husbands and wives. Societal attitudes about women's education should be reformed in support of opening rural schools for women. With 90% of women residing in rural areas and women with traditional occupations having lower fertility, more traditional sector opportunities for women in cottage industry and agriculture production are also recommended, and would help balance skewed urban growth and hypertrophication of the tertiary sector. Finally, motivational efforts should be focused upon encouraging younger instead of older married couples to limit fertility.     

Building democratic public spheres? Transnational advocacy networks and the social forum process

What, if anything, can transnational advocacy networks (TANs) contribute to the democratization of public spheres outside Westphalian frameworks? On the one hand, TANs excel at turning international public campaigns into political influence – connecting people and power across borders. On the other hand, the increasingly policy‐orientated nature of TANs raises questions about their legitimacy in speaking on behalf of multiple publics. In this article, I suggest that a TAN's success in ensuring the political efficacy of public spheres, while at the same time undermining their normative legitimacy, reflects two sides of the same coin. This is a consequence of the recent internal professionalization of advocacy networks. Framing professionalization as a particular form of communicative distortion within TAN decision‐making, I suggest that networks should incorporate internal deliberative mechanisms, adapted from international social forums, to enhance the normative legitimacy of democratic public spheres.     

职业本位与以人为本对比研究

职业教育是以人为本还是以职业为本,是关于职业教育价值观的讨论。这种价值观,决定了职业教育的目的及其本真追求。正是基于此,探讨两种观念下的不同教育才有意义有价值,才能给现代职业教育发展提供借鉴。     

Funding Civil Society? Bilateral Government Support for Development NGOs

Research on the determinants of foreign aid tends to focus on the relationship between donor country priorities and recipient state characteristics, but donors also make decisions about which organizations and programs within countries will receive assistance. Although NGOs increasingly have been recipients of foreign aid, few data are available to investigate which organizations within a given country receive that funding. Donors may prioritize structural characteristics of NGOs or their local ties—or they may seek a combination that blends concern about efficiency and accountability with an interest in developing national civil society. We use original data from Cambodia to explore whether aid is likely to go to managerial organizations (professionalized NGOs and NGOs that utilize modern management tools) or to organizations that are embedded in the domestic context. We argue that managerialism provides legitimacy for NGOs by signaling capacity and accountability to donors, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We argue that local embeddedness also confers legitimacy by aligning community ties and networks to rights-based development, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We find general support for the managerialism argument, but donor agencies do not prioritize direct funding for “indigenous” NGOs—not even among those with high levels of managerialism.     

Towards a historical sociology of constitutional legitimacy

This article has two primary objectives. First, it sets out the methodological argument that the conventional antinomy between normative and sociological approaches to questions of state legitimacy depends on a series of false constructions, and that normative and sociological – or specifically historical–sociological – analyses of states and the processes by which they obtain legitimacy can be (and ought to be) mutually reinforcing. This argument hinges on the claim that historical sociology should renounce some of its common presuppositions regarding the coercive functions of state power and reformulate itself as a normative social science, identifying and promoting models of statehood likely to obtain legitimacy in modern differentiated societies. Second, it sets out the more substantive argument that the legitimization of states can be observed both as an evolutionary or adaptive dimension of state formation and as a process of theoretical self-reflection in which the societies where states are located construct and refine the most adequate form for the transmission of the power they designate as political. In this respect, the article questions common assumptions about politics and legitimacy and makes a case for a change of paradigm in the analysis of these concepts. Through this change of paradigm, politics itself and the methods used for securing legitimacy for politics are constructed as abstracted articulations of a society’s own needs and exigencies. The article borrows elements from the systemic-functionalist sociology of Niklas Luhmann to develop the argument. In this context, the article also uses historical case studies to outline a theory of constitutions and constitutional rights. This theory explains how constitutions and constitutional rights help to generate legitimacy for states by enabling modern political systems, both normatively and functionally, to reflect and stabilize their position in society, to control the volume of politics in a society, and to elaborate socially adequate techniques for applying and restricting political power. The article concludes by suggesting that historical–sociological analyses of the functions of rights and constitutions can provide a key to proposing both normatively and sociologically founded models of legitimate statehood.

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Resistance to dominant narratives and the construction of identity legitimacy: counterstories of Chinese migrant workers with pneumoconiosis

This study is focused on the pneumoconiosis workers’ illness narratives in Bashan Town in Chongqing. In-depth interviews were used to gather their illness narratives, and a “counterstory” framework was adopted for the critical analysis of the resistance of these texts to the dominant discourse. The results showed that these pneumoconiosis counterstories to be legitimacy narratives that sought four types of legitimacy: medical, suffering, moral, and public. Three opposing identity relations were explored in these narratives: qualified vs unrecognized pneumoconiosis patients, bearers of great suffering vs complainers without cause and neglected within the pneumoconiosis group vs Invisible pneumoconiosis. These identity relations strengthened the pneumoconiosis workers’ confrontation with the illegitimacy of the main social narrative, and they were used in the attempt to construct a legitimized self-identity. The study also identified three narrative strategies used to resist the oppressive dominant narrative, they are revelation, refusal and contestation. Finally, the author proposed that these counterstories consisted a weapon for the weak to voice their legitimacy concerns and offered recommendations for the prevention and treatment of pneumoconiosis.     

Competing for orthodoxy: territorial kings and the creation of lineages among the Tujia

This paper explores cultural unity and diversity in terms of the origins of orthodoxy. First, it examines the long-standing tradition of territorial kings (tuwang) in the local context – this tradition persisted even under the native chieftain (tusi) system imposed by imperial states. Secondly, it argues that the dual identities of native chieftains reflect competing claims to orthodoxy. Native chieftains derive their legitimacy not only from the state but also from their territory. To root their legitimacy in the territory itself, native chieftains emphasized their ancestors’ heroic events and their own ability as territorial kings to protect the region from invasions by other chieftains as well as the imperial state, while also stressing their ability to provide continued spiritual protection after their deaths. This paper furthermore shows that, in the process of constructing a system of ritual orthopraxy through incorporating state-promoted rituals like ancestor worship, native chieftains gained legitimacy by integrating Tujia society, on the one hand, while expanding their territories along the Western Hunan Miao frontier, on the other hand.     

Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India

Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality's governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte-face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason.     

NEW RULES TO THE OLD GAME: CUBAN SPORT AND STATE LEGITIMACY IN THE POST-SOVIET ERA

After the collapse of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cuban state faced its greatest crisis. How the state managed to maintain sufficient legitimacy in light of the growing economic hardships and class restructuring Cuban society underwent in these initial post-Soviet years remains somewhat mysterious. A crucial element of the legitimating discourse of the Cuban state, domestically and internationally, has been the relative success of its sports teams in international competition. As symbols of the strength of the state and one of the few remaining “successes” of the Revolution, Cuban sports performances remain vital symbolic capital for current and future administrations. The problem that state officials continue to face is how to transform that symbolic capital into economic capital without sacrificing ideological principles. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Havana during the late 1990s and on interviews with sports officials, athletes, and coaches since then, this article examines Cuban officials' efforts to transform Cuban sport from a modern, centralized bureaucratic institution to a revenue generating industry within the neoliberal, capitalist, competitive, and post-Soviet world. In particular, I concentrate on the strategies pursued by Cuban sports officials in their efforts to maintain world-class sporting excellence and the ramifications of the emergence of Cuban sport as an export industry to provide a small suggestion of how legitimacy of the state was maintained and what the future of Cuban sport may hold.     

Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India

Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality's governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte-face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason.     

From an “outside group” to a catalyst for corporate change: Examining activists’ legitimation strategies

Activist organizations use issues management when pressuring corporations to alter practices and policies that these groups find problematic. Throughout this process, activists must establish legitimacy for their issue concerns, organizations, and proposed solutions to gain public support for their activities. This study qualitatively analyzes the communication practices of 21 activist organizations to understand the strategies that these unique groups harness as they seek to build legitimacy as part of the issues management process. The findings contribute to a growing body of public relations research on activist communication by introducing a new legitimation strategy that underscores the importance of ongoing issues monitoring for activists and illustrates how activist organizations can co-opt extant narratives to build legitimacy for their existing issue arguments.