Midwives,Marginality, and Public Identity Work

Because midwifery in the United States is an occupation at the margins of medicine, midwives must frequently negotiate competing identity claims. This article examines the public identity work of a group of midwives by focusing on two important tools they use to accomplish this work: boundary negotiation and impression management. Drawing on data from in‐depth interviews with twenty‐six licensed, nurse, and empirical midwives in the state of Florida, this article illustrates the ways in which midwives frame their identities in relation to history and media representations and manage public identities through boundary negotiation and impression management. I argue that the marginality of this occupation lends itself to competing categories of identity that midwives must negotiate. These categories become salient when midwives confront historical and media representations of childbirth and midwifery as well as the perceptions of the general public, consumers, lawmakers, and medical professionals.     

The ‘new industrial man’ as unhero: Doing postfeminist masculinities in an Italian pharmacological research centre

Recent work has documented the need to engage with how men construct masculinities within postfeminist discourses in the workplace. Postfeminism has sparked debates concerning the changing ideals of masculinities, highlighting the tensions between traditional forms of patriarchy and ‘new’ ways of being a man (e.g., emotional, a ‘new father’, in crisis). Men have been depicted as being in search of a new identity, opposed to the ever‐growing confidence and empowerment of women. In mobilizing postfeminism as a discourse, this article illustrates how men working in an Italian pharmacological research centre (managed by men but dominated by women) assume subject positions that contradictorily fluctuate between tradition and fluid modernity, to reveal a masculinity which we identify with the ‘new industrial man’. The postfeminist masculinities exposed in the analysis mesh pro‐ and anti‐feminist ideas by appealing to un/heroic and romanticized subjectivities. The analysis also shows how un/heroic masculinities and men's appeal to biological differences to reinforce social ones and devalue the feminine obfuscate organizational gender inequalities. The article advances masculinity theory by offering a nuanced analysis of how masculinities and men are affected by paradoxical contemporary pressures for more egalitarian gender relations and a renewed emphasis on patriarchal traditions, which continue to support the gendering of the workplace.     

Asset or Liability: Transnational Links and Political Participation of Foreign‐Born Citizens in Taiwan

Viewed as outsiders clinging onto links with their country of origin, immigrants do not often feature positively in electoral politics in their host society. Challenging this conventional view, this article examines how immigrants make use of their transnational ties to foster their political participation in the host state. This exploration is conducted through our study of the political participation of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants in Taiwan. Our research finds that transnational ties are politicized by the mainstream political parties. However, such politicization does not necessarily restrict immigrants’ agency and their sociopolitical space for political participation. Their transnational ties constitute a dynamic sociopolitical field in which these maintained connections are acted upon and give rise to a variety of strategies for responding to issues affecting their interests.     

Remittances as an Insurance Mechanism in the Labor Market

The probability that Mexican households receive remittances increases in response to temporary loss of employment by household heads. Evidence indicates that the probability doubles in the short-term, with a stronger effect in the first quarter of unemployment. Taking into account inter-household transfers within Mexico, the increase in the probability of private transfers is similar in households with low and high access to migratory networks in the U. S. The effectiveness of private transfers as an insurance mechanism has been reduced in an environment of economic crisis.     

Standard Bearers: Qualitative Sociologists’ Experiences with IRB Regulation

In response to the system for regulating research with human subjects, researchers have raised two apparently contradictory concerns: that IRBs are excessively inconsistent (often raised by biomedical researchers), and that they are excessively standardizing (often raised by qualitative interview researchers). Why does standardization appear as the dominant theme in qualitative researchers’ experiences with their IRBs? And how do qualitative researchers experience standardization in their IRB encounters? We focus on IRBs role as regulatory bureaucracies, which typically rely heavily on standardized communication and decisions to process information and make large numbers of decisions in a timely manner. We explore the role of standardization in IRB regulation of qualitative research in an analysis of semi-structured interviews with 26 qualitative sociologists from six research universities and three liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States. In a regulatory regime oriented toward the norms of experimental research, these frictions resulted partly from a lack of appropriate standardized language and decision-templates, but also from the inherent difficulties of applying standardized decisions to work that is unpredictable, unique, and difficult to routinize.     

Welfare State and Social Enterprise in Transition: Evidence from Serbia

This paper analyses welfare regime changes in Serbia and their impact on social enterprise development in the last two decades. We cover the period of significant transition-related reforms within the welfare state, with important implications on the position of these enterprises. Using data gathered from the qualitative field research, our study shows that there are two broad groups of factors that are important for development of the new generation of social enterprises, those that emerged in the last decade with an idea to foster entrepreneurial spirit and expanded into new domains other than those providing assistance to the marginalized groups. First, their decision to enter the social economy sector still depends on the environment created by the state. Secondly, their sustainability is affected by the factors typically found in any other enterprise of comparable scale like business skills, capacity to form networks and partner with relevant stakeholders.     

Somebody versus nobody: An exploration of the role of celebrity status in an election

This study examines the role celebrity status may play in potential voters’ evaluation of a political candidate presented in a newspaper article. Participants indicated greater intention to vote for a candidate who was a recognizable Hollywood actor than an unknown candidate in a political race, regardless of how substantive the political information provided about the candidate was. This suggests that familiarity with a celebrity can act as a heuristic in peripheral processing. Younger people were more likely to vote for a celebrity candidate than older voters, but how liberal or conservative participants are was not a significant factor in the decision to vote for the celebrity. Nor did participants’ need for cognition or level of political involvement predict intention to vote for the celebrity, suggesting that celebrity status is meaningful to motivated and thoughtful voters as well as those who are less motivated and informed. The possibility is raised that this could be an indication of celebrity status being used as a component of deliberate political decision-making, and future research in this direction is suggested.     

Mind-Reading and Metacognition: Narcissism, not Actual Competence, Predicts Self-Estimated Ability

In this paper, we examine the relationship between people's actual interpersonal sensitivity (such as their ability to identify deception and to infer intentions and emotions) and their perceptions of their own sensitivity. Like prior scholars, we find the connection is weak or non-existent and that most people overestimate their social judgment and mind-reading skills. Unlike previous work, however, we show new evidence about who misunderstands their sensitivity and why. We find that those who perform the worst in social judgment and mind-reading radically overestimate their relative competence. We also find origins of these self-estimates in general narcissistic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement. We discuss evidence from two studies, one involving the Interpersonal Perception Task (the IPT-15) and another focusing on inferences about partners after a face-to-face negotiation exercise. In both cases, actual performance did not predict self-estimated performance but narcissism did.     

Subjective Health-Related Quality of Life in Homeless and Vulnerably Housed Individuals and Its Relationship with Self-Reported Physical and Mental Health Status

Although the association between homelessness and objective indicators of poor health is well-established, little research has focused on the subjective health-related quality of life of homeless and vulnerably housed (HVH) individuals. This study examined the subjective health-related quality of life of HVH individuals, using the Multiple Discrepancies Theory (MDT) Scale for Health of the Quality of Life for Homeless and Hard-to-House Individuals (QoLHHI) Inventory, and its association with self-reported functional health status, as measured by the SF-12, and self-reported physical and mental health conditions in a sample of 100 HVH individuals recruited in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa. Our findings indicate that physical and mental health conditions are highly prevalent among HVH individuals and that the SF-12 Physical and Mental Component Summary scores are substantially lower compared to US population norms. The MDT Health items were not statistically significantly associated with physical or mental health conditions and only showed correlations of small to moderate magnitude with the SF-12 Component Summary Scales. These findings suggest that the QoLHHI MDT Scale for Health can provide information about HVH individuals’ subjective health experiences that is different from, and can serve as a valuable complement to, health status information for use in research and evaluation studies, as well as for policy purposes to make informed decisions based on subjective health-related quality of life data from HVH individuals.