Social Murder?

Organizational scholars have devoted substantial attention to the challenges and weaknesses of diversity initiatives. However, we still lack a clear understanding of how to design effective diversity policies, especially initiatives that will engage those in power or who otherwise may not see a benefit for themselves. How can organizations design more effective policies that successfully engage people in powerful and privileged positions? This symposium presents work that suggests avenues for positive change in diversity and inclusion policy. Together, these presentations show how different approaches to diversity affect the way people in dominant societal positions (e.g., men, Whites, the wealthy) receive and engage with diversity issues in organizations. Further, this symposium identifies how organizations can engage those in power not only to increase diversity and inclusion, but also to inspire meaningful participation from groups otherwise often excluded or even threatened by diversity conversations. This symposium also provides practical solutions and interventions to help make diversity efforts more effective - thereby making organizations truly meaningful. Talks integrate research from psychological, sociological, and organizational sciences to move beyond the challenges identified by previous researchers and suggest new ways of improving diversity and inclusion in organizations. Overall, such work can deepen our understanding of organizational approaches to diversity, while helping researchers and practitioners create better policies that successfully engage people in powerful positions. First, L.T. Phillips develops a theoretical approach to understanding how those in power react to diversity initiatives and inclusion efforts; dual concerns of maintaining power and resources and achieving a sense of personal merit drive the responses of the powerful and privileged to diversity policies. Using this lens, she provides empirical evidence that addressing maintenance and security concerns can encourage the powerful to engage positively in diversity efforts within their organizations. Second, Martin, K.W. Phillips, and Sasaki use experimental methods to test how different ideologies about gender can influence inequality outcomes. They find that gender-blind approaches (downplaying differences and focusing on similarities between men and women) cause men to stereotype women colleagues less and treat women more respectfully compared to gender-aware approaches, which contrasts with recommended approaches for reducing racial bias in organizations. Third, Wynn uses a one-year ethnographic case study to analyze high-level organizational leaders’ engagement with gender equality initiatives; she finds that leaders combine the rhetoric of the initiative with their preexisting views about gender to conceptualize diversity and its importance to the organization. Finally, Romero, Emerson, Johnson, and Malahy draw from their practitioner experience at Paradigm, a strategy firm that partners with companies to build more diverse and inclusive organizations. They outline three strategies from the field for engaging organizational leaders in diversity initiatives and discuss how these leadership engagement strategies contribute to sustainable positive change in organizations. By exploring ways of successfully diversifying organizations, this symposium suggests how organizations can increase their social value and contribute positively to the inclusiveness of marginalized groups. Strategies for Engaging Leaders: Implementing Gender Equality in a Silicon Valley Tech Company Presenter: Alison Tracy Wynn; Stanford U. The Benefits of Gender-Blindness for Men's Bias Towards and Inclusion of Women Presenter: Ashley E. Martin; Columbia Business School Presenter: Katherine W. Phillips; Columbia U. Presenter: Stacey Sasaki; Columbia Business School Using Research to Inform D&I Strategies: Lessons from Engaging with Tech Companies and Leaders Presenter: Carissa Romero; Paradigm Presenter: Joelle Emerson; Paradigm Presenter: Natalie Johnson; Paradigm Presenter: Sean Malahy; Paradigm Merit vs. Maintenance: Using Safety Nets to Promote Merit Motives Among the Powerful Presenter: L Taylor Phillips; NYU Stern

What I am learning about You, Jesus.

In this paper, we take a critical discourse analytic approach to short notes written at the end of exam papers by Iranian students asking for a higher score. Such notes are sometimes written when the student has a feeling that they might fail the exam as a result of not providing satisfactory answers to questions. We consider this to be a manipulative strategy employed by these students to control their professors. Manipulation, however, is often considered an illegitimate source of power abuse by people having the higher hand in unequal power relations [Van Dijk, T.A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & Society, 17(3), 359–383]. The present paper argues for a new understanding of this important concept in the critical discourse analysis (CDA) tradition by highlighting manipulative strategies used by less powerful people. The analysis of 71 such notes written by students in two Iranian universities suggests that the students, as people in a lower position of power, resorted to certain manipulative strategies to exert influence on professors, people in a higher position of power. Four of the most frequent strategies identified in the data will be discussed: (1) tapping into religious beliefs; (2) highlighting personal and social problems as causes for inability to prepare for the exam; (3) referring to negative consequences for failing the exam, and therefore tapping into the examiner's conscience; and (4) resorting to honorific terms to address the examiner. This study would have implications for application of CDA in Higher Education.

This is a study of the gathering and presentation of news in late 19th-century England, a time when the vote was given to a large section of the working class, when public interest in the British Empire was on the rise, and when technology enabled newspapers to be produced more cheaply, distributed more quickly, and read more widely than ever before. Using manuscript collections and newspaper archives, the author describes the production and readership of newspapers, and the journalists within the industry--how they were recruited, the organization of their work, the ways in which they acquired their information, and their access to people in positions of power. The book moves on to review changes in news presentation in the last decades of Victorian England until the appearance of such papers as the Daily Mail in the 1890s.

Religious groups offer their members social support, opportunities for leadership development, and numerous other nonspiritual benefits. While positive outcomes of church participation are worthy of attention, significant attention has not been placed on potentially negative aspects of church life. This is especially the case in the literature on the Black Church. This article examines the creation and maintenance of power structures (formalized power) and conflict in a Black United Methodist church. Themes derived from qualitative data reveal a number of paradoxes related to power, such as the observation that not all people in positions of power welcome the trappings of power. Also, results indicate that power structures are the result of a nexus between micro and macro factors which operate at both local and nonlocal levels.

“A Collective Force of Burning Ink”: Will Alexander’s Asia & Haiti Harryette Mullen* (bio) Will Alexander, Poet and Essayist: A Special Section A homegrown if not “organic” intellectual, Will Alexander is an African-American writer from South Central Los Angeles, whose surrealist poetry is global, even cosmic, in scope, encyclopedic in its display of esoteric knowledge and arcane vocabularies, visionary in its apocalyptic intensity. The author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, of which a fraction has been published, Alexander has been largely ignored by black as well as mainstream readers, scholars, and critics, despite regular appearances of his poetry and prose in Sulfur and Hambone, literary journals friendly to avant-garde poetics, edited respectively by Clayton Eshleman and Nathaniel Mackey. Beyond convenient labels such as “African-American surrealist” or “North America’s Aimé Césaire,” Alexander is difficult to categorize aesthetically as well as ideologically. However, the political landscapes of Asia & Haiti, published by Douglas Messerli’s Sun & Moon Press, could bring Alexander to the attention of a wider audience, including more black readers. Born into the early cohort of the post-war “baby boom” generation, Alexander is a child of the Cold War era, which in part defined the aspiring revolutions and liberation struggles of so-called Third World nations, that in turn inspired the Civil Rights movement and black nationalist struggles in the United States. Alexander’s father, a World War II veteran who was born in New Orleans, married a Texan and left the South for California following a military tour that took him, among other places, on a brief visit to the Caribbean. There, the elder Alexander was impressed to see black people in positions of power, and his story of that experience left a distinct impression on his son, who counts among his culture heroes Césaire of Martinique and Wifredo Lam of Cuba. Asia & Haiti deals with relatively recent historical events—shifts in power that began during the poet’s childhood—which also represent the changing role of the Third World in the latter half of the 20th century. Not only do Cold War ideologies provide subjects for Alexander’s poetry in Asia & Haiti, the era also supplies metaphors for his poetics, as seen in his essay, “Poetry: Alchemical Anguish and Fire”: “Poetics which reduce, which didactically inform, take on the infected measures of the gulag. During the earlier part of the 1950’s we see the poet Césaire in sustained resistance against this gulag. He takes on the ‘Communist’ party boss Aragon and the latter’s demand for plain spoken diacritics, for abject poverty of description” (16). [End Page 417] Published together as a book titled Asia & Haiti, the two poems “Asia” and “Haiti” exist in a kind of dialogic or interactive relationship to each other, so that together they imply a more comprehensive statement about Third World politics, and the current situation of oppressed peoples globally in the post-Cold War climate of a world no longer divided into Soviet versus United States allies sustaining a balance or stalemate between two super powers. Pairing these poems together allows the poet to explore correspondences between the political weakness and spiritual strength of the inhabitants of two countries, Tibet and Haiti, the one overwhelmed by communists and the other by capitalists. Crucial to the perspective of this work (and perhaps to Alexander’s marginalization as a black writer) is the absence of any “white oppressor” in “Asia” or “Haiti.” Alexander is careful to point out, in response to this observation, that the majority of the world’s population is not white, and that this global majority is governed by people who are not white. The power of so-called Third World people, and not only their oppression, should be a topic for serious discussion and analysis by black intellectuals. Asia & Haiti brings to mind some of the difficulties of writing and evaluating poetry within a framework of politics. The political messages of poetry written about recent or ongoing events are interpreted differently than those concerning events that for the reader have receded into distant history. In the former case, the political message tends to be foregrounded; in the latter...

Congolesecommerçantes, or transnational women traders, travel abroad to cities such as Guangzhou in search of affordable products to import to Kinshasa. Without any support from local banks, women must search for the means to finance their trips and navigate a complex bureaucracy governed by unpredictable customs tariffs. Just as men rely on their social networks to ensure the success of their business activities, women traders must also forge relationships with people in positions of power. However, a woman's social network, linked to her business activities, invites assumptions about her sexual morality. Men working within the country's unstable economic landscape are celebrated for their ingenuity and ability to ‘work the system’, while a woman's sexual morality is perceived as being affected by, and bound up in, Kinshasa's corrupt business matrices. Transnationalcommerçantesare thus not only an important part of the economic milieu, largely governed by patron–client relationships; but are also representative of changing gender dynamics in Kinshasa. Based on multi-site fieldwork in Kinshasa and Guangzhou, this article explores the moral anxieties associated with women's transnational trade, anxieties that relate to broader issues about the politics of social networks within local bureaucratic infrastructures.

Reviewed by: The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States by Craig Willse Ashley Mog THE VALUE OF HOMELESSNESS: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. By Craig Willse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015. In The Value of Homelessness, Craig Willse brings together interviews with people who work in homeless services organizations in urban centers alongside careful historical tracing and his own experiences in homelessness activism. Through this study, he critically implores researchers in the social sciences to ask different questions about homelessness. Rather than using individuals as endemic of the problem of the unsheltered, he challenges us throughout this book to denaturalize the construction of the housing system and the racial capitalism that undergirds our current neoliberal milieu. He moves through a historicization of homelessness from 1930s New Deal programs to the current moment and argues that there are specific apparatuses that "produce and distribute housing insecurity and deprivation" (22): social science; social service programs; public policy at local, state, and federal levels, and federal governmental arms that are concerned with homelessness, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Social services and social sciences shape the conversations about and resources allocated for the phenomenon of homelessness—both have been actively involved in creating the definitions that led to current governance around unsheltered populations. This governance directs what he calls "surplus life" through a proliferation of required expertise and economic imperatives. Surplus life is partially managed through a portion of the nonprofit industrial complex specifically focused on homeless services. Willse argues that these organizations work by gaining "financial backing through [a] promise to reduce the negative impact of those neoliberal surplus lives on social and economic order" (49-50). HUD additionally manages surplus life through "the databasing of homelessness" that requires programs to meet very specific requirements to receive funding (109), which then actually prevents the kinds of assistance that would alleviate the conditions of poverty that lead to homelessness. What masquerades as "helping" and "good" for unsheltered people is largely funded by organizations and governments that want the administration and obscurity of the social inequality created as a byproduct of reaping the benefits of racial capitalism. Through his careful critiques of the ways sociology has specifically theorized and methodologically conceptualized "homelessness," he asks anyone invested in social science to question the "limits of doing good" (177) through research. For example, he talks about the ways that Institutional Review Boards consider "ethical" research—as researchers we are asked to take special consideration of vulnerable populations. Doing this, while undoubtedly important, also has a universalizing effect on principles of protection: people in positions of power have a disproportionate access to shape their own narratives because "mechanisms developed to measure the ethics of research are embedded in the very institutional and governmental complexes we are trying to study" (178). How does one conduct research within an institution when that research's potential is to question the production of inequality by that very institution? Ultimately, he asks academics to think through our complicity in systems that lead to governing marginalized and vulnerable [End Page 89] populations. Questioning the "accepted configurations" (55) that we have of housing and homelessness crises, will enable us to move beyond accepting homelessness and housing insecurity as given, for example. As Willse argues, this could "undermine" rather than "underwrite" (182) the knowledge production that sustains surplus life. Ashley Mog Independent Scholar Copyright © 2019 Mid-America American Studies Association

This study examines the interplay of politics, religion and discourse in the representation of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in government-controlled news websites in Iran. It is grounded in critical discourse analysis (CDA), and Van Leeuwen’s social actor network model (2008) is used as the theoretical framework to analyse the linguistic representation of the Iranian leader. In the samples analysed, Khamenei is discursively depicted by features associated with the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 infallible Imams of the Shia tradition. Such representations elevate the authority of Khamenei in texts, and naturalise the ideology of Velayat-e Faqih, which authorises a Faqih (Jurist) to assume political leadership in Iran. In this way, the texts are used to maintain and reinforce the dominance of people in positions of power.

This article investigates electoral reforms in Indonesia and Thailand in the 21st century, highlighting important dimensions of the electoral changes and their consequences in disproportionality and the effective number of parties. In the first stage, we identify electoral changes and the ideal goals of electoral reform. Second, we compare each election's results by calculating disproportional results and the effective number of parties, followed by in-depth interviews with key stakeholders (N = 8) to uncover the evaluation and recommendation for a better future of the electoral system in both countries. The analysis reveals the government's motivation behind the electoral system chosen. In Indonesia, the reforms addressed realising the limited pluralism party system raised a thorny debate among small to medium parties about rescuing their seats in parliament. Otherwise, the Thai government accommodates small parties by waiving the electoral threshold. We identify that different people in positions of power in each country cause different ideal goals. This research contributes to developing an understanding that elite motivation outweighs the public good in designing electoral reform. While in Thailand the control to determine which electoral system is chosen seems more centralised by the junta military, the shift of the electoral system in Indonesia is strongly motivated by political actors in order to gain their pragmatic interests.

The central focus of this chapter has been the involvement of people and communities in promoting health, and we agree with Taylor (2007) who pointed out that health promotion that is imposed on people is rarely effective, and needs to be done not to people, but with and by them. However, such participatory approaches raise important issues for the practice of health promotion. Some of these issues relate to professional practice, models of working and the skills required, and these are explored further in Chapter 5. However, perhaps more importantly, we have seen that participatory approaches raise issues of power and control. Using the example of the poor health status of the Aboriginal peoples in Australia, Baum (2007) argues that efforts to improve health must recognize control as central, yet she points to other requirements too: our knowledge of the importance of control to health status (Marmot, 2004) suggests that policies should aim to encourage self-determination supported by resources that can make a difference. Linking social capital suggests a policy approach, which is trustful of communities, encourages them to do the right thing for their children and provides them with the infrastructure to create a health-promoting environment (Baum, 2007, p. 94). Baum's reference to the resources, policies and infrastructure necessary for communities to promote health reminds us that action on the social determinants of health may well require communities to have a voice with people in positions of power, and support for their efforts in the wider policy arena. Indeed if the causes of health problems are to be found at the level of macro-social and economic policies (Pearce and Davey Smith, 2003), then we need to move beyond the community to look at such wider policies, the question of power, and their relevance for health (De Vos et al., 2009). Therefore, the next chapter will explore healthy public policy and the policy process, with a focus on the importance of these for health promotion; however, in recognizing the role of people as health activists and stakeholders in relation to the policies that affect health, the question of participation and empowerment will remain a key issue.

The loss of power: How illusions of alliance contribute to powerholders’ downfall

It is certainly true that more than ten people invent a new process or product for every one who brings it to fruition. Every inventor who has been associated with a new development knows that after he has correctly formulated a problem and invented a really new solution to it, his work has only begun. The next stage is for him to convince at least a few people in positions of power that his invention can actually work. After that he has to demonstrate that the invention can work economically in comparison with existing processes or products. Only then can he proceed to the final stage of putting it on the market and finding out whether it does in practice satisfy the human need concerned.

Attempts by social scientists to document the criminal justice system's discriminatory practices against powerless social groups has a long and honourable history. The primary motivation urging this effort forward was a vision of justice. In the centre of this vision was equality before the law and even-handed treatment to all, irrespective of race, creed, or colour. Beyond this vision of justice for all was the principle that power is a constant nightmare in democratic societies. Evil, immoral and wicked people will always create havoc; democratic institutions, with their planned insistence on balance of powers, responsibility, accountability and removability, provide some guarantee that the harm people do will be limited and short-lived. But this guarantee can only be enjoyed if democratic citizens are constantly vigilant. Knowledge is the key to this vigilance. If citizens are kept in the dark about what people in positions of power are doing, then they are unable to criticise them effectively. This is why governments and people in power attempt to guard their actions zealously with notions of state security, national defence, official secrets, confidential memorandum and classified material. It simply would not do, in a free society, for citizens to know all that they ought! They might then exercise their democratic duty, namely to shine the searchlight of informed criticism on power-holders.

“Firebrand” focuses on the experience of being different and the struggles individuals face in coping with family, social, and political encroachments on identity and selfhood. “Firebrand” explores a series of challenging events and activities in my own life that evoked in me a determination to stay on the path of my own sense of meaning and truth even though I was being threatened by people in positions of power and by attempts to block, control, and restrain me. Firebrand is an affirmation of what it means to be an alive and unique human being, to maintain an authentic presence and moral values while also struggling to be personally, socially, and politically effective.