SEXUALIZING THE SOCIALOGICAL: Queering and Querying the Intimate Substructure of Social Life

This presidential address explores the sexual substructure of everyday life.¹ I focus on the intimate connections among sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Masculinist heterosexuality is a central component of the bedrock upon which ethinic boundaries rest; and feminism, unruly female sexuality, and homosexuality are three cracks in that foundation. To illustrate the usefulness of understanding the sexualized dimensions of racial and ethnic relations, and social life in general, I provide four examples of the importance of considering sexuality in race, ethinicity, and nationalism: sex and nationalism, sex and urban residential segregation, sex and conquest , and sex and race . In all four sections, I attempt to reveal the sexual substructure of social life. Moreover, I urge sociologists to consider sexuality and the role of sexual systems in their own research.     

Dealing with unknown variables in policy/program evaluation

A leading objection to the feasibility of applying benefit-cost analysis in evaluation is that one often cannot know the benefits, the costs, or the probabilities of their occurring for a given proposal. Threshold analysis involves handling unknown variables by converting relevant evaluation problems into questions as to whether a given benefit, cost, probability, or combination of these elements is more or less than a threshold. Above the threshold, the proposed program would be relatively profitable; and below the threshold, it would be relatively unprofitable. Applying that analysis may require the drawing of simple graphs to stimulate the minds of knowledgeable persons as to the range of the actual benefits, costs or probabilities. The approach can be applied when the benefits or the costs are either monetary or nonmonetary, and when the problems involve either go/no-go decisions or conflicting-choice decisions.     

Muslim Political Activism or Political Activism by Muslims? Secular and Religious Identities Amongst Muslim Arab Activists in the United States and United Kingdom

Scholarship on Muslim political mobilisation in the West has developed as an important counterpoint to public discourse, which has tended to cast Muslims as a threat to social cohesion, liberal democracy, and national security. But even as scholarly literature has shed light on civic participation among Muslims, it has sidelined the diversity of political identities and values that motivate them. Most, if not all, Muslims in the West find their identities politicised in some way, but the question of whether this leads to a consensus amongst Muslims about the role of religion in public life often remains unexamined. In this article we draw on interviews with seventy-eight activists in Britain and the United States who are both Muslim and Arab to complicate ideas about the political mobilisation of Muslims in the West. Respondents, we show, are far from unified in their views on religion as a basis for political action and mobilisation. Some are keen to place Islam squarely in mainstream political spaces; most, however, are insistent that Islam should remain a private faith and identity and that political mobilisation should take place under the aegis of Arabness or other ‘secular’ identities. Using theoretical perspectives on the public sphere, we explain the complexity of our respondents' political identities and activism. Our overall aim is to broaden perspectives on the ways in which people from Muslim backgrounds participate in public, political life in Western contexts.     

A Model for Change: Legislative Advocacy to Improving Access for the Uninsured and Underinsured in New York State 1

Advocates can successfully improve access to health care for people without health insurance. This article demonstrates the success of what began as a local advocacy effort to improve access to health care on Long Island, which later grew to become a major statewide advocacy movement. It explores the process taken by local coalition members to successfully fight for monumental public health legislation—first locally then statewide—to improve access to hospital care for the medically indigent. Using New York State as a model, it includes several approaches that could facilitate the enactment of legislation in other states. The experiences of New York advocates suggest that with focused collaborative efforts it is feasible to promote significant changes to public health laws to benefit the uninsured and underinsured.     

Zum Einfluss der Inhaberführung auf die Betriebsrat-Geschäftsführer-Beziehung – Eine theoretische und empirische Analyse in mittelständischen Unternehmen

This paper examines the quality of the relationship between business managements and works councils in small and medium-sized enterprises and strives for answering the question, which factors determine the quality. As ownership is an important determining factor of the establishment of works councils in small and medium-sized businesses, especially the impact of ownership on this relationship has been investigated. Agency theory and stewardship theory give hints that the owner management can have different impacts on this relationship. In order to test these contradictory hypotheses we have estimated a Heckman selection model to investigate which factors determine the quality of the relationship between business managements and works councils. Our results based on data generated from a survey in small and medium-sized enterprises conducted by the IfM Bonn in the years 2005 and 2006 indicate that ownership has a negative influence on the establishment of works councils, but a positive one on the quality of the relationship between business management and works council. Thus, the hypotheses predicting the existence of stewardship behaviour among owners and the existence of agency behaviour among managers can be confirmed.     

Part/whole percentaging as a useful method in policy/program evaluation

Part/whole percentaging analysis is a simple and meaningful way of evaluating alternative policies, decisions, or other options with multiple goals measured on different dimensions. That kind of analysis involves converting the raw scores of each alternative policy on each goal into a part/whole percentage by summing the raw scores for each goal and dividing each raw score by the total. One can then sum the part/whole percentages across the goals for each policy after assigning at least tentative relative weights to each goal. Part/whole percentages are added for goals that one would like to maximize and are subtracted for goals that one would like to minimize. Where the relative weight of a goal or score is too difficult to determine, one can determine the threshold value at which there is a tie between the tentative first choice and the second choice, and then just determine whether the actual value is above or below the threshold value. The aggregated part/whole percentages for each policy can be used to choose the best policy, the best subset of policies, or to allocate a budget across the policies in proportion to their aggregated part/whole percentages.     

Feminist thought in transition: Never a dull moment

In this essay, I summarize how I believe feminist thought has developed during the period 1960–2000 and where it might go in the future. First, I summarize the evolution of second-wave feminist thought during the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, focusing on liberal, radical, and Marxist–socialist feminisms. Next, I summarize multicultural, global, and postmodern feminisms as they emerged in the U.S. and elsewhere during the late 1980s and early 1990s, viewing them as a transition from second-wave to third-wave feminist thought. Third, I claim that young women today, including those who are doing feminism in the manner of third-wave feminists, are shaping a very particularistic, even individualistic form of feminism, with mixed consequences. Fourth, I will conclude that the future of feminist thought depends on its ability to resolve the sameness–difference debate, for unless women and the category of gender have some role to play in feminism, it is not clear that labeling one's self a “feminist” makes sense anymore.