WOMEN'S WORK:

We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to provide medical information and emotional support to geographically dispersed veterans. Activism transformed women activists by endowing them with a sense of empowerment and a somewhat broadened concern for social justice. Although their transformations disposed the women to become active on related issues, it did not extend to concerns about gender discrimination. We suggest that the next research step is to investigate gender differences in movement processes by surveying activists across a variety of movements to test propositions and to identify the characteristics of other social contexts that structurally instigate a departure from traditional gender roles.     

Power, Politics, and the Framing of Environmental Illness

The medical community, along with other government agencies, has created its own frame of environmental illness. This frame has been generally accepted by the American public. In this paper we discuss framing in general and the factors related to how the environmental illness frame has been constructed and maintained. We offer a brief history of the medical institution and illustrate the frame with its definitions of environmental illness. Qualitative data from a study of Oak Ridge, a contaminated community located in Tennessee, are examined to analyze the consequences of challenging the environmental illness frame. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Negotiating Gendered Subjectivity in the Enterprise Culture: Metaphor and Entrepreneurial Discourses

An enterprise culture is one in which ‘certain enterprising qualities — such as self reliance, personal responsibility, boldness and a willingness to take risks in the pursuit of goals — are regarded as human virtues and promoted as such’. Work is not seen as a constraint upon the individual but rather as an opportunity for self‐fulfilment. The pervasiveness of enterprise culture has led to observations that it influences aspects of social life beyond the workplace. However, the kind of self that is imagined in enterprise culture is also a male self, with female entrepreneurship measured against a male norm. In this article, then, we present evidence of metaphor as a strategy for coping with the gendered expectations embodied by life in enterprise culture. We show how metaphor is simultaneously an index of and a resource for understanding gendered subjectivities in enterprise culture.     

Substance use among older youth transitioning from foster care: Examining the protective effects of religious and spiritual capital

Among older youth transitioning from the foster care system, this longitudinal study examined the association of religious and spiritual capital to substance use in the past year at age 19. Participants consisted of African American (N = 179) and White non‐Hispanic (N = 133) older youth in foster care. Drawing from social capital theory, it was posited that religious service attendance (a proxy for religious capital) and belief in a spiritual force (a proxy for spiritual capital) would be inversely associated with substance use. Multiple logistic regression results indicated support for the first and second hypothesis for White foster youth only. Among White foster youth, more frequent religious service attendance and greater belief in a spiritual force were associated with a lower likelihood of illegal substance and polysubstance use. No association between religious or spiritual capital and substance use was found among African American foster youth. The findings underscore the importance of conducting spiritual assessments to help ensure older foster youth who have strong religious or spiritual orientations are in environments where they are accommodated and supported.     

Influence of an Anonymous Stranger on a Routine Decision to Act or Not to Act: An Experiment in Conformity*

The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of law-adhering and law-violating contexts on subject-behavior in a potentially law-violating situation in which the probability of negative sanctions was slight. Observations were made on subjects who had to make a decision either to violate or to adhere to a “Don't-Walk’ signal at the intersection with sparse traffic. The three specific conditions included the control-condition in which no model was present and the experimental conditions in which an anonymous male stranger, the experimenter's confederate, acted either as a law-adhering model or as a law-violating model. The presence of a law-adhering model significantly increases the rate of pedestrian-adherence to a minor legal restriction on the part of both males and females. After the ceiling effects arising from the design of the experiment were factored out, the results showed that a law-violating model has greater influence on subject-behavior than the law-adhering model does. In both the law-adhering and the law-violatin contexts, the model influences the behavior of females slightly more than he does the behavior of males.     

Provident funds and investment in developing countries in the Pacific

This report describes the current avenues of investment used by provident fund schemes in seven island nations in the Pacific; the returns on these investments; the criteria for their selection; and the governments' guidelines and restrictions on these schemes. New investment guidelines from 1988 to 1992 are summarized and the reasons for them are explained. Limitations on permitted investment avenues are briefly described. The latter part of the report, and its main focus, analyses the problems faced when trying to balance the interests of provident fund members with national interests when selecting investments. The report concludes with some recommendations for solutions to the problems related to limited investment outlets and government restrictions. To gather information for this report, a questionnaire was sent to the provident fund schemes in the Pacific and the available annual reports were analysed. Responses, when received, have been included.