Social Implications of Mobile Telephony: The Rise of Personal Communication Society

The media landscape has changed dramatically in recent decades, from one predominated by traditional mass communication formats to today's more personalized network environment. Mobile communication plays a central role in this transition, with adoption rates that surpass even those of the Internet. This essay argues that the widespread diffusion and use of mobile telephony is iconic of a shift toward a new 'personal communication society', evidenced by several key areas of social change, including symbolic meaning of the technology, new forms of coordination and social networking, personalization of public spaces, and the mobile youth culture. The conclusion speculates on future trends in the sociotechnological climate.     

Using critical social theory to develop a conceptual framework for comparative social work

This paper sets out a conceptual framework for comparing and contrasting social work within nation-states and across international boundaries. The framework is "situated" theoretically within a (late)modernist understanding of events within advanced capitalism and draws primarily on Habermas' critical social theory. The authors apply this framework to explicate the development of social work in Northern Ireland, a region in which high levels of political conflict mark it out as a site of local, national and international interest. It is suggested that the ideas developed from the case study have relevance for the social professions in other countries, particularly where social conflict is in evidence.     

Foucault's Inheritance/Inheriting Foucault

This paper outlines a set of considerations on the politics of reading by suggesting a concept of inheritance to think about the reception of Michel Foucault in organization studies. On the one hand we consider what Foucault inherited from others, the interpretations and decisions he made in relation to an earlier tradition, while on the other hand we consider how Foucault s work has been inherited as it has moved into organization studies. We read Foucault with the assistance of concepts of reading and inheritance that we, in turn, have appropriated from Jacques Derrida, which offer potential ways of considering relations between writers and the way that inheritances are instituted in practices of reading. This involves insisting on the necessity of engaging with a number of complexities, contradictions and double-binds in the texts of Foucault (and others).     

Women are angry!

This essay examines the BBC comedy pilot Lizzie and Sarah as a dissonant account of contemporary femininities. With reference to work on the grotesque, and to contemporary television comedy's use of the grotesque as a strategy, I argue that this uncommissioned pilot episode offers an incisive critique of contemporary anxieties about middle-aged women and teenage girls. While the narrative employs parody and hyperbole to humorous ends, critical commentary around the show, from its producers and from broadsheet journalists, indicates that it overstepped boundaries in terms of its account of heterofemininity. Comparing Lizzie and Sarah to makeover shows on British television, the episode constitutes an ironic feminist makeover, with its protagonists choosing to kill their oppressors rather than submit to the disciplinary regime of heterofemininity. A close analysis of the dialogue, costumes and mise-en-scene is deployed to read this comedy as a scathing commentary on the continuing limitations of television femininities.     

Marital Fertility Control Among the Qing Nobility: Implications for Two Types of Preventive Check

Demographers, as early as Malthus, have assumed that the preventive checks, delayed marriage and celibacy, were absent in traditional China. In this paper on the Qing (1644–1911) imperial lineage, we demonstrate that, instead, there may have been a different, more ‘modern’ preventive check: fertility control within marriage. Marital fertility of lineage couples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was low to moderate. Such low fertility was the product of three behavioural mechanisms: late starting, early stopping and, most significantly, long spacing. Couples apparently regulated their fertility according to their economic resources and the sex of their surviving children. Moreover, they did so, we suggest, by regulating their coital frequency. Deliberate fertility control, in other words, was already within the ‘calculus of conscious choice’ for some Chinese well before this century. The speed of contemporary sinitic fertility transitions may accordingly be attributed to the fact that they did not require a change in attitudes, only the diffusion of new incentives and effective technologies.     

Preventing hepatitis C virus transmission among young people in the justice system

Young people involved with the criminal justice system have been identified as a group at high risk of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. This study was designed to explore the feasibility of assessing an individualised structured HCV prevention intervention among young people recruited from post release agencies and youth drug and alcohol services in Victoria, Australia.