Absent Role of the State: Analysis of Social Support to Older People with Disabilities in Rural China

China is experiencing rapid population ageing and already has 44 million older people with disabilities aged over 59 years. Yet social support of these older people with disabilities is undeveloped and not well researched. This article contributes by using a disability rights framework (right to life and protection, economic security and social support) to analyze local cases in rural China. It finds that, although the family is still the main provider of economic and care support to rural older people with disabilities, the absence of a state role in welfare provision has negative impacts on the well‐being of older and younger generations in rural families.     

WHAT MAKES THE LOCAL? A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF THE REJUVENATION OF HONG KONG IDENTITY

This paper ascertains what makes the local and why the local is important, in the context of change in Hong Kong due to the political transition to PRC sovereignty.In doing so, I hope to pose a modest polemical challenge to cultural studies' tendency to overlook seemingly simplistic empirical information. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 has led to a contraction of the political sphere, as the convergence of political structures curbed the development of local identities. The label or category ‘Hong Kong people’ was then appropriated with a specific meaning for the local to resist encroachment of the national. It was true that the high intensity of dominant national discourses during the political transition created a favourable atmosphere for re-nationalization. However, as soon as the political transition was over, Hong Kongers re-adhered to their own label in their struggle for cultural autonomy.Their strong cultural affect toward various national icons during the transition quickly diminished. This multiyear discourse study (1996–1998), which utilizes social scientific methods in conjunction with cultural theories, illustrates important political and methodological impulses necessary for the formulation of a socio-political approach to cultural studies within the Hong Kong context.     

SCALING GOVERNMENTALITY

This article explores contemporary uses of museum co-production for public policy through a sustained theoretical engagement with Tony Bennett's work on museums as an ‘object of government’. The specific focus is a theoretical discussion of the ‘logic of culture’ as it relates to new UK policy uses of participants' ‘experience’ as the desired site of authenticity at the very same time as the process of expressing this authenticity is located as a site for reform. It is argued that Bennett mobilizes two techniques of scale (fixing the analytic lens of governmentality and drawing on a strong scalar correspondence of power) in order to secure a relatively disciplinary reading of governmentality and to foreclose the resistant possibilities of cultural politics. Drawing on the differences between practices associated in UK museums with ‘access’ (which works through the dis-intensification of the difference between the museum and everyday life) and with ‘social impact’ (which requires a re-intensification of this difference in order to increase the visibility of effect), this article concludes by countering Bennett's more disciplinary uses of Foucault with the Foucault of ‘The Subject and Power’. It is argued that the ‘logic of culture’ can be calibrated to varying intensities in considering the coming-into-relationship between the museums and those-to-be-involved. It is specifically argued – following Foucault's spatializaton of ‘thought’ as distance (limit-attitude) and ‘counter-conduct’ as proximity – that the ‘logic of culture’ might be actively re-calibrated to use the spatialized dynamic of distance and proximity to create spaces which might allow the museum and its associated policy – not just those involved – to be affected by the co-production encounter.     

THE POPULAR IN THE POLITICAL SYSTEM

This paper suggests a systems theoretical re-reading of popular communication and the Popular in the political system. Luhmann' anti-humanist notion of communication helps to reframe the discussion of the Popular: it is not defined by an en- or decoding instance, but by a particular mode of ‘connectivity'. Drawing from heterogeneous material (Mars Attacks!, crowd psychology, theory of democracy), it is argued that the problem of the Popular arises when a functional system has to represent something that transgresses the system' universality. That which the system has to exclude to become a system re-emerges as ‘grotesque hybrid’, thus pointing at a universality that is, on the one hand, an opportunity for a further universalization and, on the other, a threat to the very universality of the system. The ‘Popular’ thus acquires a hybrid position by articulating these two dimensions.     

Disability and Abuse in Relation to Substance Abuse

Abstract

This analysis reviewed five years of a state's substance abuse treatment admissions and discharges in order to identify specific patterns among persons who had a disability. Using a series of group comparisons, Chi-squares, and logistic regressions, specific patterns of violence and abuse to this population were identified. Results indicate that persons who had a disability and abused substances were more likely to be victimized by physical abuse and domestic violence when compared with their peers without a disability. A person with a disability had about one-half to one-third the odds of receiving long-term residential, short-term residential and intensive outpatient care when compared with persons without a disability.     

Women with Disabilities and Experiences of Abuse

Abstract

A qualitative study of disabled and non-disabled professionals and survivors of abuse revealed a range of types of abuse endured by disabled women, some of which were unique to that population. Two major themes emerged from data analysis: vulnerable beginnings and complexity of abuse. Three sub-themes are encompassed within complexity of abuse: active abuse, abuse through image, and contextual abuse by social service/legislative systems. The authors present data essential to an informed assessment and analysis of abuse that considers the person-in-environment circumstances of women with disabilities. Implications for future research and the human behavior in the social environment curriculum are discussed.     

Conceptualizing Cultural Politics in Subcultural and Social Movement Studies

In this article it is argued that combining theories of social movements and subcultures provides a way of 'conceptualizing cultural politics'. The focus is on debates that have taken place over the conceptualization of subcultures and social movements as well as the status and viability of cultural politics. Contemporary subcultural theorists are critical of the rigid concepts used by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) but, it is argued, they provide few feasible alternatives. They also have little to say about the supposed contemporary significance of cultural politics. New social movement (NSM) theorists, on the other hand, have generated conceptual frameworks that recognize the complexity of collective phenomena and have developed an approach which enables us to engage with the controversy over cultural politics. However, they concentrate too narrowly on struggles waged at the level of lifestyle, culture and civil society. The article shows how, like the CCCS, critics of NSM theory rightly question the potency of symbolic challenges and stress the persistent role of material issues and the continued part that conventional political actors, such as the state, play in contemporary social conflicts. Finally, the case of New Age Travellers is used to illuminate these debates in subcultural and social movement studies and to show how elements of each approach can be employed fruitfully in empirical research.     

The Glocal and Global Studies

Abstract

This article offers an overview of engagements with the glocal and traces the consequences of this research agenda for Global Studies. First, it compares the emergence of the global and the glocal in the literature. It tracks the uneven impact of the business use of the glocal and argues that this genealogy has obscured alternative accounts. Second, it offers a thematic overview of the uses of glocalization in the literature. It highlights publication clusters in specific areas of interdisciplinary interest. It further addresses key criticisms against glocalization. Finally, it explores the vicissitudes of research on glocalization on the scope and definition of Global Studies. Trends in Global Studies appear to move in an opposite direction from the one suggested by glocalization. This could lead to the emergence of a separate field of Glocal Studies, causing further fragmentation in the field.     

History,Culture and Organization Studies

Research by Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) showed that the publication of Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1982) coincided with culture becoming a popular and acceptable topic for organization theorists. This helped establish the dominance of a conception of culture that proffered an instrumental view of the relation between managerial practice and management knowledge, Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) suggested. They saw this as a relatively recent occurrence. While we do not deny the possibility of the instrumental relation as depicted in Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988), we do not concur with their judgement that the study of culture is a relatively novel interruption of previously more academic concerns. On the contrary, we suggest that, while the relationship between practice and knowledge is borne out by a genealogical analysis of culture, the time period for such analysis should be drawn both more widely and more deeply to be an adequate test of Barley, Meyer and Gash's (1988) hypotheses. We argue that the relationship postulated in the hypothesis supported by their research - that academic research on culture has increasingly been prejudiced by instrumental concerns that developed in the lead up to, and in the wake of, the 'excellence' studies - defies social science traditions. We show this by enlarging the canvass of culture. The purposeful use of organizational culture as a management tool returns culture to those origins revealed by genealogical analysis that uncovers its etymology and sociology.     

Challenging Stereotypes Surrounding Disability and Promoting Anti‐oppressive Practice: Some Reflections on Teaching Social Work Students in Northern Ireland

Relatively high levels of dependency on disability benefits in Northern Ireland has led to widespread assumptions within this society that fraud and abuse are rife within the social security system. Consequently, many of those in receipt of disability benefits are stereotyped as dishonest, malingerers and scroungers. This stereotyping is damaging to all disabled people and undermines the security that the welfare system is supposed to provide. Social workers are obliged to work within an anti‐oppressive framework, addressing issues of oppression and discrimination. It is therefore imperative that strategies and techniques, which raise their awareness of these issues, are developed. This article describes a teaching strategy that was introduced in the first year of a social work degree programme, to enable students to recognise and reflect upon cultural stereotypes, and comments on its effectiveness.