Some Issues of Ethnic and Religious Identity among China's Islamic Peoples

The paper considers the growth of identity among Muslim ethnic groups in China, especially the Sinic people called the Hui. It asks whether this identity springs primarily from ethnicity or religion. While affirming that Islam has grown in influence in China since the 1980s, the paper argues in favour of seeing the balance more strongly in favour of ethnicity. The paper also discusses the impact of the September 11 Incidents on Muslims in China. Addressing the issue in terms of ethnicity and religion, it discusses the ramifications of the recognition of the Uygur-based East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organisation by the US and United Nations. It explores important issues relating to morality and human rights and concludes that the Chinese have cause to worry about separatist terrorism based on Islamic fundamentalism in southern Xinjiang, but criticises using recognition of ETIM as terrorist as a weapon against the general religion of Islam or against Uygur identity.     

Evidence‐Based Treatment

This polemic argues that evidence‐based treatment is only one important consideration when deciding a therapeutic program. The exclusive use of evidence‐based therapy would be detrimental to the development of better psychotherapy. Evidence‐based therapy has an important part to play in the future of psychotherapy. It employs scientific and statistical procedures rigorously. This article is not intended to argue against its use, only to point to the dangers of an evidence‐based dictatorship in which financial and insurance imperatives will force us into using such therapies exclusively. This situation would stifle creativity and the individuality of both the therapist and the client.     

Democracy's Dilemma: Explaining Racial Inequality in Egalitarian Societies

While contemporary criticisms of Gunnar Myrdal's liberal reformism provide an important perspective on racial ideology (G. Myrdal (1944) An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row), most people miss Myrdal's most provocative point. Rather than assuming that egalitarianism could only oppose racial inequality, Myrdal argued that commitment to egalitarianism led Euro-Americans to avoid the dilemma presented by racial inequality in an egalitarian society. Rather than predicting the disappearance of racism, this analysis can be used to predict an increasing demand for racism in the wake of de jure attempts to eliminate racial inequality.     

Reconceptualizing Women's Paid Informal Work: Some Lessons from Lower‐Income Urban Neighbourhoods

This article evaluates critically whether women's paid informal work is low‐paid market‐like work conducted for the purpose of economic gain. Drawing upon interviews with 400 households in UK lower‐income urban neighbourhoods, we show that only a small segment of the paid informal work conducted by women is of this character. The vast bulk is undertaken for and by friends, relative and neighbours under non‐market relations for reasons associated with redistribution and sociality. Given this finding, we thus conclude that a reconsideration is required of whether eradication alone is always the appropriate policy response.     

The press and public access to the environment and development debate

This paper presents an analysis of some aspects of newspaper coverage of environment and development issues. In particular, Global Warming and the Sudan famine are used as case studies of the features of this coverage. It argues that there are few grounds for adopting the optimistic view, as taken by some researchers, that the press will sustain and deepen its reporting of these issues. The analysis uses a computer-based methodology in which a key feature is the use of full-text on-line database of the contents of four newspapers. This paper presents the first steps in applying this methodology to the investigation of press reporting. It shows how the broad quantitative indicators available from this source can illustrate comparative patterns of newspaper coverage over long time periods and a wide range of themes. The ultimate purpose of this analysis is to understand the processes which contribute to informing or educating public debate about issues that crucially affect the political and economic future of society. The argument is that the press does educate the public (its readers) but that this process is highly selective, it can contradict espoused editorial policy, and frequently environment and development issues receive less prominence as their political significance increases. The analysis shows therefore that in many cases the coverage given to these issues actually declines even as their significance increases. The authors argue that a social solution is required if the press is to be re-established as a public educator in a more positive sense. Methods must be developed for monitoring and influencing the processes by which the press manipulates the climate of opinion whilst nurturing its readership. One approach to this problem is taken by the Education Networks for Environment and Development Project at Sussex University where the results of this type of analysis are used to inform an open network of workers in a variety of professional institutions. Future investigations will look in more detail at this concept.     

Accounting for Disability: Customer feedback or citizen complaints?

This paper has two aims. First, it will summarise the findings of a study of the views and experiences of adults with acquired physical impairments. This entailed taking open-ended accounts from respondents in order to elicit their concerns and experiences. The paper will focus on two aspects of data from the study: views about health and social services; and those about citizenship. The second aim of the paper is to situate the role and status of personal accounts of disability within the health and social policy context of recent years, which has been characterised by both consumerism and an intensification in the activities of the disability movement. In the run up to the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act, it became clear that the purchasers (now 'commissioners') of health and social services would be encouraged to elicit users' views of services, to engender a needs-led not provider-led approach. Later in the paper we will discuss the relationship between this officially endorsed consumerism and the concerns of disabled people when voicing their views. It will be argued that personal accounts of disability have gained a cultural currency because of the convergence of processes linked to consumerism within recent British health and social policy on one side and new social movements on the other.     

Religion, Rationality, and Experience: A Response to the New Rational Choice Theory of Religion

This paper is a critical response to the newest version of the rational choice theory of religion (RCTR). In comparison with previous critiques, this paper takes aim at RCTR's foundational assumption of psychological egoism and argues that the thesis of psychological egoism is untenable. Without that thesis, the normative aspects of religious commitment cannot be reduced validly to instrumental reason. On neither conceptual nor empirical grounds therefore can religion or religious commitment be defined comprehensively in terms of exchange theory. With the failure of psychological egoism as a point of departure, the paper articulates an alternative theory of religion, one based on the epistemic rationality grounded in religious experience and religious emotion .