Claims Of Others Research Articles

The power of the accused: rights mobilization and gender inequality in school workplaces

AbstractLaw and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasilegal, and/or extralegal processes. Based on a national random survey of teachers and administrators, and in-depth interviews with educators in California, New York, and North Carolina, we find an integral relationship between gender inequality and experiencing rights violations, choices about rights mobilization, and obstacles to formal mobilization. Compared to complainants, those accused of rights violations – especially male administrators – are more likely to use quasilegal and legal mobilization to defend themselves or to engage in anticipatory mobilization. Actors in less powerful status positions (teachers) most often pursue extralegal mobilization to complain about rights violations during which they engage in rights muting as a means of self-protection; when in more powerful status positions, actors use rights muting as a means of self-protection and to suppress the rights claims of others. This paper concludes with implications for future research on rights mobilization in school workplaces amidst changing political and demographic conditions.

Freedom to Operate analysis as competitive necessity—the Selden automobile patent case revisited

Abstract We contribute a unique empirical account of Freedom to Operate (FTO) analysis in respect to patent claims of others to avoid infringement liability. Over a century ago, the Selden automobile patent owners asserted that its scope encompassed early US automobiles. FTO analyses of the Selden patent claims demonstrated their narrow scope and hence their non-infringement. The legal opinion by patent attorney Parker on the Selden patent gave Ford Motor Company the confidence to publicly indemnify its customers from infringement liability and to publicly challenge the broad claim interpretation of the Selden patent. The asserted broad interpretation of Selden’s patent claims is sometimes alleged today to have retarded US automobile industry development but a review of commercial evidence of the development does not support this conjecture. That developers were undeterred is consistent with the FTO analyses conducted by Ford and others, and the patentee’s avoidance of a court challenge to the validity of the Selden patent on the merits. The Selden case should be known as the classic empirical example of how firms conduct FTO analysis to assess patent scope and validity to enable continued development. The prevalence of FTO practice today should be considered as a reason why such conjectured economic harms from ‘over-broad’ patents may not be realized today. Yet, we found a dearth of publicly available FTO analyses and lack of rigorous empirical studies demonstrating the actual extent of FTO analyses. Given continuing concerns over the harms from ‘over-broad’ patents, there is a need for research into the economics and behavioural influence of FTO analysis.

“He doesn't really have bipolar …“. The rise of strategic essentialism and diagnostic possessiveness in bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder has risen in prominence in recent years, arguably in part through its association with various celebrities and positive related attributes such as creativity. The category itself has also widened with increasing numbers seeking out the diagnosis. Drawing upon observations of a psychoeducation programme for bipolar disorder and semi-structured interviews with those diagnosed, this paper considers the role of diagnostic prestige and essentialism in shaping identificatory practices surrounding bipolar disorder. The data suggests that bipolar comes to fulfil a meaningful explanatory role for participants, providing an important sense of group belonging and identity.This tendency to positively relate to bipolar in order to promote social cohesion and positive self-understandings is linked to the practice of ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1990; Voronka, 2017), whereby category homogeneity is emphasised. The benefits associated with the diagnosis arguably encourage boundary making and homogenisation in order to prevent category dilution and loss of meaning. As such, while essentialism can be helpful in maintaining group cohesion, it is also associated with diagnostic possessiveness, whereby individuals undermine the diagnostic claims of others, creating divisions between those with and without the diagnosis.

Ontology as a Guide to Politics? Judith Butler on Interdependency, Vulnerability, and Nonviolence

In recent work, Judith Butler has sought to develop a ‘new bodily ontology’ with a substantive normative upshot: recognition of our shared bodily condition, they argue, can support an ethic of nonviolence and a renewed commitment to egalitarian social conditions. However, the route from Butler’s ontological claims to their ethico-political commitments is not clear: how can the general ontological features of embodiment Butler identifies introduce constraints on behaviour or political arrangements? Ontology, one might think, is neutral on questions of politics. In this paper I reconstruct Butler’s response to this challenge, arguing that there is an interesting and plausible path from ontology to politics. I draw on Heidegger’s ontological/ontic distinction to elucidate the central concepts of Butler’s ontology: vulnerability, precariousness, and interdependency. I argue that one of Butler’s central attempts to derive an ethic of nonviolence from ontology is unpersuasive, resting on a conflation of the ontological and ontic senses of ‘interdependency’. Nonetheless, I contend that Butler is right that genuinely acknowledging our vulnerability is likely to make us more responsive to the claims of others, loosening the grip of ideals of invulnerability and sovereign independence. These ideals and the violence they encourage amount to a disavowal of our ontological condition, while commitment to nonviolence is a way of acknowledging</em it. Since a failure of acknowledgement is an ethical failure, we have a responsibility to act in ways that acknowledge our shared ontological condition—a general conclusion that is of interest even if one contests the specifics of Butler’s ontology.

Mozart Englished

Mozart’s concertos for piano have always been subject to claims that they are being performed in circumstances that would have been familiar to the composer. ‘Conducting from the keyboard’ is a slogan rarely far from performances and recordings of this repertory, and the practice is occasionally claimed to reflect how Mozart would have performed his music himself. Although Murray Perahia was genuinely honest when he reported in 1987 that he wanted to conduct from the keyboard because he found aligning his performances with conductors difficult, most conductor-pianists do not even bother to repeat what they consider self-evident: that conducting Mozart concertos from the keyboard grants some kind of access to the composer’s aims that other modes of performance do not. This modern practice seems to have started with Edwin Fischer in Berlin in the 1930s, but was picked up systematically by his pupil Géza Anda’s complete set of recordings with the Camerata Academica des Mozarteums Salzburg in the 1960s; from then on—Daniel Barenboim was an important pioneer in the UK—it became part of the landscape of Mozart concerto performance. But of course, the practice was a modern mythology. Yes, composer-performers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries worked with their violinist colleagues to direct the performance, but they also contributed much more to the tutti and ritornello textures from the keyboard as well. This is a far cry from the mixture of performing the solo part and then indulging in interpretative conducting during the ritornellos and tuttis that modern ‘conducting from the keyboard’ involves. When Fischer developed the practice in the 1930s, he was inventing a modern technique—quite reasonably in response to the monumental performances he must have heard in his youth—but despite the claims of others he was not recovering a practice from the past.

\u2018Dams and flows\u2019: boundary formation and dislocation in the financialised firm

Mainstream economic theories of the firm argue that the boundary between firm and market is determined by efficiency-enhancing logics which optimise coordination or bargaining outcomes. Drawing on social anthropological work, this paper critiques these accounts, arguing instead that firms are socially embedded and that firm boundary formation should therefore be understood as an attempt to fix the limits of certain relational rights and obligations that are moral in their conception. Consequently, boundaries are often contested and subject to renegotiation. We employ the parsimonious concepts of ‘dams and flows’ to examine how attempts to curtail the claims of some stakeholders and extend the claims of others at any one historical moment produce boundaries of different kinds. To illustrate this, we first trace the moral arguments used to advance limited liability rights to shareholders during the Companies Act in the mid-nineteenth century, which cut or ‘dammed’ obligations at a particular point and moment, directing new flows of obligation and wealth. We then explore the different moral reasoning of agency theory—the foundation of the financialised firm—which foregrounds the property rights of shareholder principles and obligations of managerial agents to them. We argue that this moral reasoning led to new dams and flows that have changed corporate governance and accounting practice, producing—counterintuitively—a reinvigorated form of managerialism, leaving the firm financially and morally unstable; its boundaries increasingly unable to contain its relational tensions.

What Is That To You?

What Is That To You?

Principles for evaluating knowledge co-production in natural resource management: Incorporating decision-maker values

A key reason for undertaking transdisciplinary processes such as knowledge co-production in natural resource management is to access and apply different knowledge systems to complex issues. However, the value of co-production is predominantly framed by academics. They have focused on research design and outcomes in the form of ‘science informing policy’. In this paper we build a more inclusive and holistic framing of knowledge co-production incorporating values of non-academic participants, and values related to the participatory process. Specifically, we examine how knowledge is communicated and deliberated upon and the requirements for this to be done effectively. We draw upon empirical data from interviews with natural resource managers who participated in two case studies of knowledge co-production in Australia and South Africa. Their perspectives are captured in eight evaluation principles that build upon existing evaluation frameworks for public participation. Critically, decision-makers valued science-based outputs not just as salient knowledge sources, but to give legitimacy to their decisions. This need for legitimacy necessitates transparency, fairness and inclusivity in knowledge selection, participation and dialogue within knowledge co-production processes. The practice-based knowledge of decision-makers was important for contextualizing and applying science to specific decision contexts. Another key finding is that communicative competence is central to the process of knowledge co-production because it enables participants to critically explore and understand the knowledge claims of others.

Legitimation Strategies in International Hierarchies

AbstractHow do hierarchical cores or metropoles legitimate their influence or rule? How do their approaches to legitimation inform resistance? This theory note rethinks how legitimation operates in hierarchies, with a focus on variation in cores’ legitimation strategies. I argue that varying claims to hierarchical legitimacy shape both action at the core and resistance at the periphery. I develop a four-part typology of legitimation strategies, differentiated along two axes. On the first, cores may be universalist, recognizing no legitimate equals, or competitive, recognizing other cores as peer rivals. On the second, they may chiefly innovate legitimacy claims internally, drawing them from their own political traditions, or externally, borrowing the claims of others. These strategies shape available options for revisionism by rivals and resistance by hierarchical subordinates. I illustrate with historical examples.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Hunger, Need, and the Boundaries of Lockean Property

Locke’s property rights are now usually understood to be both fundamental and strictly negative. Fundamental because they are thought to be basic constraints on what we may do, unconstrained by anything deeper. Negative because they are thought to only protect a property holder against the claims of others. Here, I argue that this widespread interpretation is mistaken. For Locke, property rights are constrained by the deeper ‘fundamental law of nature,’ which involves positive obligations to those in need and confines the right to excess property within circumstances where it is not needed to preserve human life.

Wage‐labour and a double separation in Papua New Guinea and beyond

AbstractIn this essay, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour is used to perform a double separation within and between persons. The first aspect of this separation is a separation of activities that are characterized as ‘labour’ from the person performing the activity thus characterized. This separation is the precondition for the second separation: namely a partial and often contested separation between the two parties to the contested wage‐labour transaction. Ethnographically, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour has been used to perform this double separation in Papua New Guinea in recent years. The analysis of these separations has a long pedigree in Western critical thought, the first being at the heart of Marx's conception of the worker as person in a capitalist political economy, for example. The second separation creates the possibility of momentary perspectives from which persons can present themselves increasingly as discrete individuals separate from the claims of others. Ethnographic analysis demonstrates how the category of ‘labour’ and related idioms create possibilities for the historically shifting emergence and dissolution of different idioms of the person in contemporary PNG, which is taken as a specific instance of an important global phenomenon.

Human Rights and Broken Cisterns: Counterpublic Christianity and Rights-based Discourse in Contemporary England

ABSTRACTAlthough human rights are often framed as the result of centuries of Western Christian thought, many English evangelicals are wary of the U.K.’s recent embrace of rights-based law. Yet this wariness does not preclude their use of human rights instruments in the courts. Drawing upon fieldwork with Christian lobbyists and lawyers in London, I argue that evangelical activists instrumentalise rights-based law so as to undermine the universalist claims on which they rest. By constructing themselves as a marginalised counterpublic whose rights are frequently ‘trumped’ by the competing claims of others, they hope to convince their fellow Britons that a society built upon the logic of equal rights cannot hope to deliver the human flourishing it promises. Given the salience of contemporary political conservatism, I call for further ethnographic research into counterpublic movements, and offer my interlocutors’ instrumentalisation of human rights as a critique of the inconsistencies of secular law.

Heritage and Identity

Research Article| December 01 2017 Heritage and Identity Elizabeth Depalma Digeser Elizabeth Depalma Digeser Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Studies in Late Antiquity (2017) 1 (4): 333–334. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2017.1.4.333 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Elizabeth Depalma Digeser; Heritage and Identity. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 December 2017; 1 (4): 333–334. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2017.1.4.333 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentStudies in Late Antiquity Search For good or for ill, heritage is no antiquarian concern. Preserving one's heritage is not about collecting facts for their own sake, or curating curios for their aesthetic value. Heritage is a tangible connection to ancestors, to patrimony, and thus to identity. It is an inheritance that connotes entitlement and thus a sense of desert. While Cicero may have thought that if someone loses their patrimony, only an individual would suffer (Pro Caecina 26), that is not true if the patrimony of some groups or individuals has been systematically diminished by the heritage claims of others. In such cases, “heritage” has a darker cast, encoding and perpetuating the values of the dominant culture. Indeed, across the long twentieth century, as some groups have stepped forward to claim their patrimony, others have sometimes tried to deny them: by parrying their own heritage claims, they attempt to reassure themselves not only... You do not currently have access to this content.

‘To whom does my body belong?’

Summary In debates over whether a society should recognize the right of an individual person to end his or her own life (and to enlist the services of a physician to do so), the question is often formulated in terms of ownership: Who owns my body? Those who advocate for self-ownership of their body see the reason for the public enforcement of this right to be “autonomy.” Those who advocate for societal ownership of anyone's body see the reason for the public recognition of this right to be “heteronomy.” And those who advocate for God's ownership of anybody see the reason for the public enforcement of this right to be “theonomy.” Advocates of autonomy, though, have difficulty in justifying a right of self-ownership, since humans are far more dependent on others than they are on themselves. Self-ownership implies a largely fictitious self-sufficiency. Advocates of heteronomy, though, have difficulty in justifying a right of public ownership, since this has been the justification of totalitarian regimes to eliminate persons arbitrarily deemed dangerous or even useless to them. And advocates of theonomy, though, have difficulty in justifying the killing of any living being that is a creature of God. This paper will argue that the whole ownership model is morally flawed. Instead, a model of mutual care is morally more adequate. In this model, we are all both the subjects and objects of care, and that we couldn’t survive were this not so. We come into the world as infants totally dependent on the care of others. As we grow into adulthood, we become the subjects of the claims of others to care for them and for ourselves along with them. Society's task is to coordinate our mutual roles as care-receivers and caregivers. No functioning adult is only a caregiver or only a care-receiver. As caregivers we have duties; as care-receivers we have rights. Autonomy should only be invoked when society claims ownership of any of its members. Heteronomy should only be invoked when an individual person acts as if his or her decision to live or die involves nobody else, and nobody else should be concerned. And theonomy should be invoked whenever an individual person or a society claims to have created himself or itself and to have the right to do with themselves whatever they please. Therefore, individual persons have the right to call for their society to care for them when they cannot help themselves, instead of the right to call for society to help them eliminate themselves from society even when they want to do so. A society has the right to call for individuals to care for themselves and others when they can do so, instead of the right of a society to eliminate individual persons it no longer wants to care for. And religious believers can affirm both the duty of individuals to care themselves, and the societal duty to care for its individual members, are to be exercised in imitation of the God who cares for creation and who commands human creatures to act accordingly. God's unique ownership of creation, however, is another matter and, as such, it is inimitable.

Introduction: new ethical fields and the implicitness/explicitness of ethics in Africa

Throughout history, people on the African continent have experienced momentous transformations of their lifeworlds and ways of living, some of them irruptive, uncompromising and cataclysmic, others of a more subtle and negotiable nature. What remains to be dealt with in more detail by anthropologists are the manifold ways in which these transformations are reflected in, and have a bearing on,people’s ethical demeanours, commitments and debates. Given the complexity and variability of these processes, it is not possible or even desirable to give a conclusive answer to this question. Instead, taking account of historical and sociocultural specificities, this special issue features in-depth case studies of ethics as ideals in practice from several countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana,Guinea Bissau, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania). In doing so, the contributions combine a presentation of ethnographic findings with a discussion of a new conceptual approach for a practice-oriented anthropological study of ‘ordinary ethics’ (Lambek 2010). In this introduction,we argue for a rather fluid notion of ethics that entails people’s convictions, value judgements and sentiments on how to live a morally good and/or just life.We suggest that the making and unmaking of ethical fields takes place within the context of state politics, the influence of international organizations and the emergence of new publics and local NGOs that provide people with new ideas about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We show that these ethical fields emerge in dialectical processes between what we call the ‘implication’ and ‘explication’ of ethics. In what follows, we first briefly reflect on previous anthropological work on ethics in Africa. We then delineate the parameters of our conceptual approach, before finally commenting on how the articles in this special issue broaden our understanding of everyday struggles in contemporary Africa to achieve or to maintain a certain ethical composure, to win relevant others over to committing themselves to particular ethical principles, or to position oneself in relation to the (un)ethical claims of others.

Sovereign Tropes: A Rhetorical Critique of Contested Claims in the South China Sea

Abstract The South China Sea is the world’s busiest and most important waterway, serving as the crossroads of global capitalism and the connective tissue of Southeast Asia. With shipping routes, underwater resources, and hundreds of small islands claimed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and others, the area stands among the world’s most contested regions. Since 1945, the United States Navy has dominated the area, but that hegemony is now in question as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) becomes more assertive as a rising power. In efforts to justify their clashing claims over the region, the United States and the PRC have launched campaigns against each other, producing a rhetorical crisis that may foreshadow war. To try to make sense of the rhetoric driving this crisis, the first part of this essay unpacks some of the colorful history of the South China Sea—its legacy of rogues, pirates, opium wars, and so on—to argue that it has always been less of a governed and ordered place and more of a transitory and heterodox space crisscrossed by overlapping intentions, designs, and dreams. From this perspective, any nation’s claims to sovereignty are fictions that aspire to be constitutive, albeit by erasing the constitutive claims of others. The second section of the essay then addresses the PRC’s use of “traumatized nationalism” to advocate for its rights in the South China Sea, while the third section tackles the United States’ use of “belligerent humanitarianism” to justify its actions. The essay concludes with an appeal for a postnational version of shared governance, called for in the name of defending the global commons from the militarized encroachments of nation-states.

Shalom, bitches: Epistemic stance and identity work in an anonymous online forum

How individuals discursively identify themselves through digital media and augment their claims of knowledge and legitimacy is at the core of this study. This article draws on the tools of Conversation Analysis to show how participants discussing the approval of a Hebrew language charter school in an online community forum claim access to particular kinds of knowledge and expertise through linguistic and interactional means. We ask: given the particular constraints and affordances of an asynchronous, anonymous online forum, how do participants position themselves and others with regard to identity? Despite the asynchronous nature of the forum, we show how such identity work is accomplished interactionally through the use of online affordances, as participants position themselves and others to bolster their epistemic stance, or to weaken the epistemic claims of others.

Patient Credulousness as a Deterrent of Complaining Behaviour

Credulousness as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is ‘the readiness to believe the claims of others without sufficient evidence’. As patients have a tendency to believe their health service provider too readily, there are chances of being easily deceived. Hence, it was pertinent to analyze the intensity of patient credulousness in this study. Patient credulousness, through phenomenological research, was defined in terms of trust, belief, obedience and doubtless approach towards the doctor. Data analysis revealed that out of the total respondents who participated in the study, almost half of them had a tendency to easily believe and obey their medical service provider. A significant difference existed between respondents possessing various levels of medical awareness as well as those admitted in hospitals belonging to north, central and south Kerala in respect of their credulousness, from the results of one-way ANOVA. Multiple comparisons using Tukey HSD tests revealed that the true differences prevailed between respondents possessing medium awareness and high unawareness about the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures as well as between those who were admitted in hospitals belonging to south Kerala from those in north and central Kerala. A statistically significant difference was observed between respondents belonging to various age groups, educational and occupational levels, marital status and those admitted in different types of hospitals belonging to different regions of Kerala in respect of patient credulousness

Reclaiming Proportionality (Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture 2016)

Reclaiming Proportionality (Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture 2016)