Reviews

Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method, New Mexico University Press, 1986, By John, Collier, Jr. and Malcom Collier

Snapshot Versions of Life, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987, By Richard Chalfen

Six‐Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, University of California Press, 1975, By Will Wright, St. Lawrence University

Bitter Melon: Stories from the Last Rural Chinese Town in America, University of Washington Press, 1987, By Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow

Committing Photography ‐ Yes and No, But Mostly Yes. A Review Essay of Committing Photography, by Su Braden, Pluto Press, 1983

Sociology in a Changing World, by William Kornblum, Holt, Reinehart, and Winston, 1987     

Young people's reproductions of the ‘father as provider’ discourse: intersections of race,class, culture and gender within a liberal democracy

ABSTRACT

Despite a plurality of paternal forms available to men, certain enactments of fathering remain immobile. In South Africa the ‘father as provider’ discourse, which establishes the legitimate father as one who provides financially for his family, continues to be regarded as the primary mark of a good father. Using photo-elicitation interviews to interrogate the persistence of this discourse, this paper examines how adolescents from two low-resourced South African communities construct fathering. Using a critical intersectional discursive framework, the analysis focuses on how gender, race, class and culture are implicated in the reproduction of the ‘father as provider’ discourse. Participants’ constructions suggest that the father’s duty to provide is intensified within marginalised contexts. Central to participants’ reproductions of the ‘father as provider’ discourse was a neoliberal conception of ‘freedom of choice’. The paper concludes that South Africa’s post-apartheid reliance on discourses around liberal democracy has cast the low-income father’s ability to fulfil the provider role as a conscious choice. While the father is made responsible for his failure to provide, broader structural oppressions are in turn rendered largely invisible by such discourse.     

Success and Failure in Professional Projects: The Nature,Contours and Limits of Consulting Professionalism

This paper offers an analysis of the professional project that was pursued by the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) on behalf of its members. The paper builds on Sturdy's (2011) call to develop empirically grounded accounts of the ways and means of consulting. In addition, it responds to the analysis of the Association of Project Management (APM) developed by Hodgson, Paton and Muzio (2015), which invited further comparative study of professional projects. Drawing on archive data, this paper develops a comparative analysis that considers four key themes: (1) the professionalization strategies developed by the IMC and the APM; (2) jurisdictional issues and shifts in the fields of consulting and project management; (3) the structure of credentials developed for practitioners in both arenas; and (4) the attitudes and actions of key stakeholders shaping policy in the APM and the IMC. The paper examines the contrasting fortunes of the APM and the IMC, yet observes similarities in working practices across these apparently distinct settings. Reflecting on this comparison, the authors consider the nature, contours and limits of consulting professionalism and conclude with the suggestion that, within the analysis of professional projects, conventional conceptualizations of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ should be considered as ‘impostors’.     

Covert social movement networks and the secrecy-efficiency trade off: The case of the UK suffragettes (1906–1914)

This paper formulates and empirically tests a number of hypotheses regarding the impact of covertness upon network structure. Specifically, hypotheses are deduced from theoretical arguments regarding a ‘secrecy-efficiency trade off’ which is said to shape covert networks. The paper draws upon data concerning the UK suffragettes. It is taken from a publicly archived UK Home Office document listing 1992 court appearances (for suffrage related activities), involving 1214 individuals and 394 court sessions, between 1906 and 1914. Network structure at earlier phases of suffragette activism, when the movement was less covert, is compared with that during the final phase, when it was more covert and meets the definitional criteria of what we call a ‘covert social movement network’ (CSMN). Support for the various hypotheses tested is variable but the key claims derived from the idea of the secrecy-efficiency trade off are supported. Specifically, the suffragettes’ network becomes less dense and less degree centralised as it becomes more covert.     

Peer Nominations of Emotional Expressivity Among Urban Children: Social and Psychological Correlates

The current study examined associations between peer nominations of children's expression of negative emotions and psychological, social, and behavioral correlates in a sample of 523 first graders. Children (85 percent African‐American) completed a peer nomination measure for expressing negative emotions. In addition, three other domains of functioning were assessed using multiple raters: internalizing symptoms (self, parent), externalizing behavior (parent, teacher), and social competence (parent, teacher). Regression analyses indicated that peer nominations of negative emotions predicted higher levels of teacher‐rated externalizing behavior and lower levels of teacher‐rated social competence. Peer nominations of emotions were significantly associated with teacher ratings but unrelated to self‐ and parent‐report measures. Adding to a small but growing literature, our findings underscore the importance of assessing peer perceptions of children's emotional expressivity and their associations to social and psychological functioning in an urban, predominantly African‐American sample.     

Wake-up call leads to organizational transformation

We've all heard the buzzwords--organizational transformation, corporate compliance, culture change, transparency. We may tire of the jargon, but as pressure continues to mount, organizations--particularly those viewed as performing public service--are being forced to rethink old habits, find truly measurable ways to evaluate performance, and become more accountable in every aspect of their operations.     

Neuropathology in Alzheimer's disease: awaking from a hundred-year-old dream

For one hundred years after Alois Alzheimer's first report of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in 1906, the pathological hallmarks of the disease, senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), have been attractive targets for researchers. Therefore, not surprisingly, efforts to understand disease mechanisms have concentrated on the cell biology of amyloid-beta (Abeta) deposition as senile plaques or on the phosphorylation and aggregation of tau as NFTs. However, it now appears that this focus on pathology as a central contributor to disease may be misguided. Indeed, neurons associated with Abeta and NFTs in AD brain show a decrease in oxidative damage relative to those in vulnerable but morphologically intact areas of the brain, suggesting that neurodegenerative lesions are compensatory phenomena, and thus manifestations of cellular adaptation. That Abeta and tau accumulations indicate an age-related physiological reaction to chronic stress calls into question the rationale of current therapeutic efforts targeted toward lesion removal. Moreover, if this concept holds true for pathology in other neurodegenerative diseases, we may need to restructure our thinking and undergo a paradigm shift before substantial progress can be made in therapeutic intervention.     

Identifying the time of change in the mean of a two-stage nested process

Statistical process control charts are used to distinguish between common cause and special cause sources of variability. Once a control chart signals, a search to find the special cause should be initiated. If process analysts had knowledge of the change point, the search to find the special cause could be easily facilitated. Relevant literature contains an array of solutions to the change-point problem; however, these solutions are most appropriate when the samples are assumed to be independent. Unfortunately, the assumption of independence is often violated in practice. This work considers one such case of non-independence that frequently occurs in practice as a result of multi-stage sampling. Due to its commonality in practice, we assume a two-stage nested random model as the underlying process model and derive and evaluate a maximum-likelihood estimator for the change point in the fixed-effects component of this model. The estimator is applied to electron microscopy data obtained following a genuine control chart signal and from a real machining process where the important quality characteristic is the size of the surface grains produced by the machining operation. We conduct a simulation study to compare relative performances between the proposed change-point estimator and a commonly used alternative developed under the assumption of independent observations. The results suggest that both estimators are approximately unbiased; however, the proposed estimator yields smaller variance. The implication is that the proposed estimator is more precise, and thus, the quality of the estimator is improved relative to the alternative.