Deep-seated Assumptions Research Articles

From vulnerable subjects to research partners: a critical policy analysis of biomedical research ethics guidelines and regulations

Over the last three quarters of a century, international guidelines and regulations have undergone significant changes in how children are problematised as participants in biomedical research. While early guidelines enacted children as vulnerable subjects with diminished autonomy and in need of special protection, beginning in the early 2000s, international regulatory frameworks defined the paediatric population as vulnerable due to unaddressed public health needs. More recently, ethical recommendations have promoted the active engagement of minors as research partners. In this paper, I adopt a post-structuralist approach to policy analysis to examine deep-seated assumptions and presuppositions underlying the changes in the problematisation of children as biomedical research participants over time. While biomedical research ethics focuses on the autonomy and vulnerability of minors, ethical guidelines are situated in specific sociocultural contexts, shaped, among other things, by contingent public health needs and changing conceptions of the value of research and science for society. In the process, I demonstrate the challenge of moving away from an approach that in taking adults as the model overshadows the complexity of children’s lived experiences as well as their personal, cultural, and social lives. The lack of acknowledgement of this complexity makes children vulnerable to epistemic injustice, which is particularly crucial to address in public involvement initiatives.

From punishment to help? Continuity and change in the Norwegian decriminalization reform proposal.

In 2018 the Norwegian government appointed a committee to prepare the implementation of a drug decriminalization reform. The overall goal of the committee was to propose a model where responsibility for society's response to the use and possession of illegal drugs for personal use would be transferred from the justice sector to the health service, under the catchphrase 'from punishment to help'. While the proposal ultimately did not get the necessary backing in parliament, the proposed reform still constitutes a very comprehensive and recent proposal for reforming national drug policy and it provides an ideal case for studying contemporary discourses on 'drug decriminalization'. The analysis of this reform proposal is guided by the post-structuralist "What's the Problem Represented to be" (WPR) approach, which is used for investigating the problem representation(s) in the proposal, as well as the rationalities, practices and deep-seated assumptions underpinning these. In doing this, the paper explores how the strategy represents both changes and continuities in discourses around illicit drugs and the people who use them. Based on the WPR approach, two problem representations in the proposal are identified: the 'problem of illicit drug use' and the 'problem of criminalization'. However, the 'problem of illicit drug use' is argued to be the authoritative representation, that takes precedence over the other. In that regard, the paper points to how the proposed shift from the justice sector to the health sector would only be partial, given that the role of the police and drug law enforcement would be retained in the reform. Furthermore, the paper points to how illicit drug use continued to be fundamentally pathologized in the proposed reform. The paper concludes with a discussion about the overall ambition of shifting from a crime-centered to a health-centered approach to people who use drugs and some reflections on the potential of an additional rights-based approach is provided.

Department Leaders as Critical Conduits for the Advancement of Gender Equity Programs

Although women have made tremendous strides toward gender equity within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields over the past couple of decades, reaching full equity will require the support of faculty colleagues. Department chairs and heads are crucial as the conduit between administration and faculty, yet they are traditionally an understudied contingent. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 10 STEM department heads at a U.S. university, we uncovered the limiting ideologies that guide department leaders’ sensemaking around achieving gender equity—specifically meritocracy, objectivity, and neoliberalism. We discuss the implications for gender equity programs within higher education in terms of addressing these deeper frames of reference to achieve long-lasting outcomes. On one hand, change agents can leverage these dominant ideologies to create a shift in department leaders’ mind-sets, leading to earlier understanding and buy-in; on the other hand, failing to critically challenge these deep-seated assumptions and beliefs can impede long-term success.

Producing the vulnerable subject in English drug policy

The concept of vulnerability is now deeply embedded in English drug policy, influential in governing practices such as prevention and treatment activity but yet to be subject to critical scrutiny. In this article, we offer an appraisal of the vulnerability zeitgeist in contemporary drug policy, drawing upon insights from similar endeavours across a range of policy areas to consider the underlying assumptions and various effects of this conceptual logic. Using an approach to policy analysis which supports the questioning of deep-seated assumptions and implications of particular representations of ‘problems’ in social policies (often referred to as the ‘What’s the Problem?’ [WPR] approach, Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016), we analyse the 2017 Drug Strategy to facilitate a close perspective on the texture of governance in relation to people who use drugs in England. We explore how vulnerability and drug use are in Bacchi’s (2018; 6) terms ‘problematized’ and ‘made ‘real’’ as a specific kind of phenomenon, drawing attention to the presuppositions and potential effects of being labelled (or not) as vulnerable. We argue that alongside bolstering targeted support, the current problematisation of vulnerability in English drug policy supports the operation of subtle disciplinary mechanisms to regulate the behaviour of those deemed vulnerable, underplaying the role of material inequalities and social divisions in the unevenness of drug-related harms. We then use the WPR approach to guide a discussion of the burgeoning multi-disciplinary literature on vulnerability, exploring orientations and effects of alternative representations of the ‘vulnerable’ drug users. Producing the ‘vulnerable’ subject in these alternative ways creates a different and deeper understanding of the ‘problem’ and consequently its ‘solutions’, allowing more space for human agency to be considered and directing attention beyond drug policy towards tackling the diverse multiple social marginalisations which make some people more likely than others to experience drug-related harms.

A Perspective of One's Own: Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead

A Perspective of One's Own:Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead Elizabeth Langland Form and content are inseparable. Story depends on technique, depends, Henry James claimed, on "every word and every punctuation point."1 Although Thomas Hardy could be expected to resist his contemporary's strict attention to minutiae, James's broad point about the interdependence of idea and form nonetheless helps explain problems in Hardy's Jude the Obscure and particularly in that elusive character, Sue Bridehead, who is a touchstone for many of the difficulties posed by Hardy's final novel. Critics have called this character childish, selfish, sadistic, masochistic, narcissistic, and frigid, all in explanation of what has been defined as her dominant trait: inconsistency.2 But these conclusions have not satisfied even their authors, among whom Irving Howe is representative in cautioning: "Yet one thing, surely the most important, must be said about Sue Bridehead. As she appears in the novel itself, rather than in the grinder of analysis, she is an utterly charming and vibrant creature."3 Perhaps a character can be so fluid and complex that she eludes the combined critical efforts to capture her. But, before despairing of analysis altogether, we should consider Sue's inconsistency and elusiveness in light of formal difficulties in Hardy's last novel. That Sue Bridehead has resisted satisfactory analysis points both to problems in the formal conception of Jude and to the inadequacies of its point of view in conveying a growing sensitivity to other versions of the novel's central experiences. An omniscient narrator, such as Hardy offers in Jude, should be a guarantee of reliability, but Hardy's final narrator eludes and evades. And, for the first time, Hardy lets the perspective of a single character, Jude Fawley, dominate the story. To complicate matters further, it is not clear to what extent Jude's perspective is judged by the narrator, or even, as criticism has made clear, to what extent Hardy himself is involved in his narrator's and character's perspectives.4 In light of these complications, inconsistencies in Sue Bridehead's character and behavior call for reassessment. [End Page 54] We must disentangle Sue's character from the problematic narrative point of view which presents her—a point of view primarily Jude's, but buttressed by the narrator's. To do so, we confront questions of character autonomy and the matrix for judging character. As James saw, we cannot simply wrest character from the context of narrative technique and point of view. In discussing Sue's character, we must continually account for the novel's point of view which is closely allied with Jude's experience and with a man's perspective on an unconventional woman. And, any effort to resolve questions about Sue's personality must take into account the relationships among mimesis, narrative technique, and character development. In this larger context, we recognize that Jude's primacy in the novel must shape Sue's role in it, much as in Tess of the D' Urbervilles the eponymous character determines and limits the representation of Alec D'Urberville and Angel Clare. In Jude the Obscure, Arabella and Sue clearly have as one primary function their appeal to opposite poles in the protagonist's nature: the fleshly and the spiritual. Such an observation has become commonplace, but its consequences for character representation have great importance. Hardy's last novel does not imitate Sue and Jude equally. It imitates the way in which one credulous and naive, but well-intentioned, man, Jude, confronts a world which he sees as increasingly inimical to his desires and goals. He is limited by the society in which he finds himself, by what Hardy calls the "hereditary curse of temperament,"5 and by the conventionality of his own nature. Thus, one of Sue Bridehead's other narrative functions is to unmask the deep-seated assumptions which baffle Jude's hopes. That we come to recognize his personal limitations is essential to a tragic denouement which finds him partially responsible for his fate, not merely a pawn in society's or the universe's machinations. His share of responsibility gives Jude a tragic stature. This imitation, with...

Teaching Leadership Critically: New Directions for Leadership Pedagogy

Conventional approaches to teaching leadership in business schools have overrelied on transformational models that stress the role of charismatic individuals, usually white men, in setting compelling visions to which all organizational actors are expected to subscribe. Such approaches pay insufficient attention to the dynamics of power, the influence of context, and the significance of follower dissent and resistance. This article examines the pedagogical potential of critical leadership studies: an emergent, alternative paradigm questioning deep-seated assumptions that power and agency should be vested in the hands of a few leaders and exploring the dysfunctional consequences of such power dynamics for individuals, organizations, and societies. It also recognizes that follower compliance and conformity, as well as resistance and dissent, are important features of leadership dynamics. Informed by our own experience of trying to teach leadership more critically, this essay highlights a number of guiding principles that we have used in the classroom to encourage a more questioning approach from our students in their study of leadership.

The Conundrum of the Veil and Mohja Kahf's Literary Representations of Hijab

This essay examines the semiotic complexities involved in the Muslim veil as an object that has almost invariably become a defining feature of Muslim female subjectivity. More specifically, I endeavour to show that the veil has acquired a monstrous power to the extent that even within a transcultural ambit of norms, the Muslim woman – whether veiling or not – is seen either positively or negatively through the presence or the absence of the veil and thus appears as always already improperly covered. I will draw on Peter Schwenger's study of the gaze of the object as a useful analytical tool to probe into the complexities regarding the visual power of the veil. To demonstrate this argument, I will then examine the ways in which Syrian–American writer and scholar Mohja Kahf engages in the scholarly conversation on dress and identity in the context of diaspora and thereby reimagines new ways of being Muslim, Arab and American. Kahf's work intervenes in the trite yet dominant binary manner of thinking about the veil as invariably symbolizing oppression or emancipation. I end the essay with a reference to the works of the French guerrilla artist Princess Hijab and the ways s/he queers the dominant meanings attached to the veil in the field of visual culture. Both Kahf and Princess Hijab draw on the visual power of the veil in an attempt to defamiliarize it. They problematize deep-seated assumptions about the centrality of the veil as a major defining feature of Muslim female subjectivity.

Critical Reflections on the Entrepreneurship Programme Designed to Develop Effectual Entrepreneurs

This article reports on a study that was largely a qualitative, critical examination of the Tsohang Entrepreneurship Programme which was designed to develop effectual entrepreneurs. The programme was primarily examined in terms of its theory of change, which evaluates effectuation, as well as evaluating its effect on the trainees' mind-set, as assessed through business decision processes and improved business practices. Effectuation advances a business decision process that attempts to guide business actions and activities toward choosing particular effects on the grounds of the available means, using the principles of affordable loss, the surprise factor and network building to fabricate and reshape markets. The critical reflection theory was predominantly used for scrutiny and critique of the programme's theory of change as well as certain other aspects of the programme. This was achieved through firstly, broadly identifying and examining the deep-seated assumptions embedded in the programme's conception and applications. Secondly, the study concentrated on tracing the origins of these assumptions. Thirdly, it focussed on evaluating their relevance in our context and within the Small to Medium businesses framework and finally, on suggesting improvements to the programme. The critical reflection theory was additionally utilised to discover the extent to which programme's trainees developed alternative decision processes as a result of their exposure to the programme and how that, in turn, improved their business practices. Through collection of data and analysis of interviews as well as observation, the data were organised in the form of vignettes or critical incidents permitting these researchers to understand some of the effects of the programme on beneficiaries' decision processes and learn of improvements on their business practices. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n25p53

Engineers for change: competing visions of technology in 1960s America

In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society--influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford--began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its very nature--and not from engineering's failures. Sociotechnologists were recruited to help society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.

Liberals under autocracy: modernization and civil society in Russia, 1866-1904

With its rocky transition to democracy, post-Soviet Russia has made observers wonder whether a moderating liberalism could ever succeed in such a land of extremes. But in Liberals under Autocracy, Anton A. Fedyashin looks back at the vibrant Russian liberalism that flourished in the country's late imperial era, chronicling its contributions to the evolution of Russia's rich literary culture, socioeconomic thinking, and civil society. For five decades prior to the revolutions of 1917, The Herald of Europe was the flagship journal of Russian liberalism, garnering a large readership. The journal articulated a distinctively Russian liberal agenda, one that encouraged social and economic modernisation and civic participation through local self-government units (zemstvos) that defended individual rights and interests--especially those of the peasantry--in the face of increasing industrialisation. Through the efforts of four men who turned The Herald into a cultural nexus in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the publication catalysed the growing influence of journal culture and its formative effects on Russian politics and society. Challenging deep-seated assumptions about Russia's intellectual history, Fedyashin's work casts the country's nascent liberalism as a distinctly Russian blend of self-governance, populism, and other national, cultural traditions. As such, the book stands as a contribution to the growing literature on imperial Russia's nonrevolutionary, intellectual movements that emphasised the role of local politics in both successful modernisation and the evolution of civil society in an extraparliamentary environment.

Fallen elites: the military other in post-unification Germany

Military officers are often the first to be considered politically dangerous when a state loses its authority. Overnight, actions once considered courageous are deemed criminal, and men once praised as heroes are redefined as villains. In Fallen Elites, Andrew Bickford examines how states make soldiers and what happens to fallen military elites when they no longer fit into the political spectrum. Gaining unprecedented entry into the lives of former East German officers in unified Germany, Bickford relates how these men and their families have come to terms with the shock of unification, capitalism, and citizenship since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Often caricatured as unrepentant, hard-line communists, former officers recount how they have struggled with their identities and much-diminished roles. Their disillusionment speaks to global questions about the contentious relationship between the military, citizenship, masculinity, and state formation today. Casting a critical eye on Western triumphalism, they provide a new perspective on our own deep-seated assumptions about soldier making, both at home and abroad.

Who are we responsible to? Locals’ tales of volunteer tourism

Existing studies have often suggested that volunteer tourism, with strong overtones of “social”, “justice” and “pro-poor” tourism, has the capacity to bring about positive impacts to local communities in host destinations. Wearing, for example, advocates volunteer tourism “as a development strategy leading to sustainable development and centering the convergence of natural resource qualities, locals and the visitors that all benefit from tourism activity” ( Wearing, 2001: p. 12). Indeed, underlying assumptions in volunteer tourism suggest that it is a form of tourism that allows the empowering of locals in host-communities, and when compared to conventional modes of tourism, volunteer tourism allows cultural interaction and understanding to be developed between hosts and tourists in the longer period and more intimate form of contact. This, together with very direct and tangible outcomes of volunteer projects, appears to put in place a platform where locals and tourists both have the power to actively negotiate their identities and relations with each other. However, despite these deep-seated assumptions about the positive value in volunteer tourism, little empirical research has been conducted to assess the situation on the ground. Existing literature is largely centered on the volunteer tourist, with little works directly regarding the perspectives of host-communities. This places much uncertainty on whether the assumed benefits of volunteer tourism are indeed realized. Adopting a geographical approach, this paper begins with a review of existing discussions on the geographies of care and responsibility, and its intersections with literature on responsible tourism (of which volunteer tourism is often seen to be a part of). Opinions re-presented in this paper are based on interviews with 14 respondents in Cambodia (including local Cambodians, non-government organizations’ (NGO) and missionary workers that have previously hosted volunteer tourists in Cambodia. This paper thus explores both positive and negative opinions of volunteer tourism from the perspective of host-communities, and endeavors to contribute a balanced discussion to the limited literature regarding host-communities’ perspectives in tourism development.

Regeneration through Genre: Romancing Katrina in Crime Fiction from Tubby Meets Katrina to K-Ville

This essay examines detective fiction that takes New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as setting and theme. It explores the ways in which stories told in novels and prime-time TV shows across the interlocking genres of police procedural and crime thriller have steered a sensationalist course through the recovery of the city over the last five years. It considers the role and representation of the New Orleans Police Department in particular, and of law enforcement officials more broadly, as post-Katrina protagonists who protect and serve the city, a rejoinder to media-made myths according to which they deserted their posts in the days after the storm. It closes with a case study of FOX TV's K-Ville, the first television series to depict New Orleans post-Katrina in a sustained way, and investigates the extent to which it was judged harshly for translating the disaster into a formulaic cop show. Deep-seated assumptions about genre, narrative form, the burden of representation and popular ideas about this particular locale inform the reception of these genre fictions.

Multiple Ways of Coordinating Volunteers With Differing Styles of Service

Volunteerism is changing, and traditional ways of coordinating volunteers need re-examination in order for human service programs to survive. Our practitioner/academician team has been using well-known frameworks to reveal deep-seated assumptions about how people volunteer at the dawn of the 21st century and how changes in volunteering influence the organization and coordination of those efforts. The different styles of volunteering demand that coordinators' engagement strategies vary when different worldviews are held. In this article, four types of volunteer programs are identified: traditional, social change, serendipity, and entrepreneurial. Examples of each program type are provided, along with guidelines for their oversight. We conclude with a call for research that examines the important differences in how to appropriately use the talents of increasingly diverse types of volunteers in community practice.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: discrete subtypes or a spectrum of disease?

Although the condition we now call sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (sCJD) was the first human prion disease to be described, it remains in many important respects the least well understood. In the familial forms of CJD (fCJD) the close association with mutations in the prion protein gene ( PRNP ) limits speculation concerning their aetiology. For the acquired forms of human prion disease (kuru, iatrogenic CJD and variant CJD), we have a good understanding of aetiology in terms of the source of infection and the routes of exposure, and we can model these diseases in experimental animals with a degree of confidence. However, exactly upon what aetiological factors the apparently ‘sporadic’ nature of sCJD depends is open to a number of possible interpretations; and these points of view tend to reflect deep-seated assumptions in the minds of those working on prion diseases or, as they have also been known, the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. A traditional view of sCJD (often informed by analogies with animal transmissible spongiform encephalopathies and their modelling in mice) tends towards viewing all of these diseases as acquired. In this scenario, sCJD represents cases of human transmissible spongiform encephalopathy for which the human (or animal) source of infection is yet to be determined. By extension, the PRNP mutations associated with familial forms of CJD are proposed to represent susceptibility factors that make infection (presumably by an ubiquitous agent in the environment) and consequent disease almost certain within an individual's lifetime. An alternative view, often favoured by those who subscribe to the prion hypothesis, regards prion protein metabolism as an error prone process. Rarely (and if the incidence of sCJD is a reliable indication, it is a very rare event indeed), the normally benign or positively beneficial cellular prion protein acquires a self-perpetuating abnormal folding state, which ultimately leads to neuronal …

Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race

Abraham Lincoln has long been revered by blacks and whites alike as the Great Emancipator. In recent years, however, this image has come under assault by scholars who question Lincoln's commitment to racial equality and who assert that he was in fact, as Frederick Douglass once noted, the white man's president. Such arguments challenging deep-seated assumptions about our nation's most beloved leader demand serious investigation. What personal beliefs did Lincoln hold about the inherent differences or similarities between blacks and whites? How did his vision for race relations change as a result of the Civil War? What political, legal, and cultural circumstances prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation? And in what ways have Americans chosen to remember Lincoln's legacy? Does he truly deserve his fame as the Great Emancipator? In this volume, seven historians attempt to answer these critical questions. Kenneth Winkle analyzes the racial climate of the early nineteenth-century Midwest in order to place Lincoln's views in context. K.R. Constantine Gutzman discusses the influence of Thomas Jefferson's racial politics upon Lincoln; and James N. Leiker scrutinizes Lincoln's attitudes toward Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics as well as toward blacks. Phillip S. Paludan and Brian Dirck describe Lincoln's tortured deliberation over emancipation, while Dennis K. Boman uses Missouri as a case study of the president's delicate handling of this explosive issue. By tracing the changes in Lincoln's proposals for the future of liberated slaves, Michael Vorenberg argues that, despite what many Americans today would consider limitations, Lincoln demonstrated a remarkable openmindedness and capacity for growth.

Primer on Organizational Culture

This note discusses organizational culture, distinguishing among surface-level artifacts, formal and informal practices and norms, and deep-seated assumptions and values. The typology can be used to perform a cultural audit of a group or organization.

Reviewer 198, the Hedgehog, and the Fox

Troubled by what appears to be a tendency in strategy research toward prescription, informed by a monist and inevitably reductionist but rarely questioned dogma-the belief that there is a single harmony of truths into which everything, if genuine, must fit-the author proposes that future research is best served not by the extant theoretical heterogeneity or by a dominant paradigm but by being grounded in theories of heterogeneity. Using a typical peer review as a point of departure, the author proceeds to articulate this trend, disentangle its deep-seated assumptions, and consider its consequences for progress in our discipline.

Purity and Danger of an Information Infrastructure

We critically assess deep-seated assumptions and images of an information infrastructure, namely, that it needs to be uniform, tidy, and nonfragmented. This is necessary because our perception of order is socially constructed and, more importantly, because it has implications. Based on an historical reconstruction of the establishment of a Lotus Notes-based infrastructure in an internationally oriented oil company with 17,000 employees, we describe and analyze the productive role that appeals to an orderly infrastructure play. We trace its sources and describe how it operates. We also identify the implications in terms of choice of technological solution, delegation of organizational roles, and making organizational actors (in)visible.

REVIEWER 198 AND NEXT GENERATION THEORIES IN STRATEGY.

Troubled by what appears to be a tendency in strategy research towards prescription, informed by a monist, and inevitably reductionist, but rarely questioned dogma the belief that there is a single harmony of truths into which everything, if genuine, must fit. I propose that future research is best served not by the extant theoretical heterogeneity, nor by a dominant paradigm, but by being grounded in theories of heterogeneity. Using a typical peer review as a point of departure, I proceed to articulate this trend, disentangle its deep-seated assumptions, and consider its consequences for progress in our discipline.