Degree Of Legitimacy Research Articles

A NOTE ON INKATHA MEMBERSHIP

THE REMARKABLE, SUSTAINED upsurge of popular resistance to apartheid in South Africa is inevitably calling forth urgent consideration within the white ruling bloc and beyond concerning the manner in which the revolutionary impetus can be stemmed by a restructuring of the presently discriminatory political and economic system into a 'fairer', non-racial and, above all, more stable form. Within such a context, discussion of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi's Inkatha movement as an agent of reform is to the fore in that not only is it seen as sufficiently moderate and responsible as to have committed itself to making federal and/or power sharing options work but also in that it is perceived in liberal-reformist circles as possessing the necessary minimum degree of legitimacy as a black nationalist movement to make a reformist pro ject viable. 1 Correspondingly, as the ANC or other movements (most notably the United Democratic Front, UDF) grow in stature in tandem with the growing challenge they mount, so attempts are madc if not to delegitimize them then at least to suggest that their predominance is diluted by widespread Black support for other less demanding and, it is often implied, more democratic bodies. A recent piece by Woodrow Wyatt (a former British Labour M.P.) which was given prominence in The Times is a case in point. Thus, after suggesting that the ANC looks forward to establishing some form of 'Trotskyist Government' and lambasting the Western media for unhelpfully highlighting the extent 'of outrages by the South African authorities rather than of less exciting constructive aspects', Wyatt continued as follows:

Human Rights under State Socialism

The paper is in four parts. The first outlines the debate that has occurred in the West about whether human rights, and about what human rights, are desirable and possible in socialist states. In the second it is contended that the normative approach to rights in socialist states has been influenced but not determined by the theory and practice of the USSR. Human rights under Marxism–Leninism are ambiguously defined: there is an unresolved tension between individual (and group) rights, on the one hand, and class and collective rights on the other. Socialist states, it is claimed, have different units, types of claims and priorities of rights. In the third section, it is argued that the Soviet model of rights has a particular correspondence with Russian culture. Its impact on other socialist countries (Poland is considered, as an illustration) depends on the internal social structure (the strength of interest groups) and the degree of legitimacy of the state. Finally, some prognostications are offered concerning the dynamics and likely developments of rights claims under socialism.

6 Jordan and Saudi Arabia: Monarchies at the Crossroads?

Monarchies would appear to be a dying breed of political system, and those in which royal heads of state rule as well as reign are rarer still. As to the Middle East, the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 was widely regarded as betokening the imminent demise of other dynastic regimes in that part of the world. Yet a closer look at Jordan and Saudi Arabia—both critically important to U.S. interests in the area—indicates that their governments seem to enjoy a considerable degree of legitimacy and, despite major problems, are likely to survive for some time to come. They do, however, face significant challenges in a period of rapid and unrelenting change. and

"Seduced and Abandoned": Convention and Reality in Edith Wharton's Summer

"SEDUCED AND ABANDONED": CONVENTION AND REALITY IN EDITH WHARTON'S SUMMER Nancy A. Walker Stephens College R. W. B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff have prepared the way for a revival of interest in the work of Edith Wharton,1 and she may finally have slipped out from under the imposing shadow of Henry James. While critical attention in recent years has been focused on her long novels of New York society in the nineteenth century, Wharton's small masterpiece Summer (1917) has either been largely ignored or relegated to the position given it by early reviewers: a less tragically powerful and therefore less significant work than Ethan Frome, with which it shares a setting in the Berkshire Mountains.2 Blake Nevius has seen the novel as one of the many instances in Wharton's fiction of the "baffling, wasteful submission of a superior nature to an inferior one" and says that lawyer Royall is "thwarted and humiliated by his passion for his self-centered ward Charity."3 More recently, Wolff, who correctly sees Summer as on one level an exploration of a woman's awakening to sexuality (and thereby invites comparison of the novel to Kate Chopin's The Awakening), overlooks the essential ambiguity of the novel when she calls it "a hymn to generativity and marriage."4 The complexity of Summer is due in large measure to Wharton's use of the conventional "seduced and abandoned" theme so pervasive in both popular and serious fiction of the period. The usual heroine in such a story is either a naive young girl who succumbs to the charm of the heartless seducer or (and especially in fiction in which the central consciousness is male) the virgin-turned-bitch who hounds the man into a hasty marriage, thus ruining his chances for success. Wharton's characterizations are far more realistic, and the novel enlarges upon the conventional theme to become a story about the ambiguity of human relationships. Charity Royall is admirably shrewd and strong rather than merely an innocent victim; Lucius Harney, the young architect with whom she has her first sexual experience, is, despite his air of worldliness, more weak than opportunistic; and lawyer Royall, Charity's guardian and eventually her husband, is both would-be seducer and rescuer of the seduced. Wharton emphasizes the complexity of human character and motivation by creating tension in Summer between the inevitability of fate—represented most strikingly by images of animals, prisons, seasonal cycles, and the Fall—and the suggestions of human sympathy and endurance. The name of the main character is the emblem of this 108Notes tension. Charity Royall is on one hand the recipient of the charity of North Dormer's nearest approach to royalty. Her guardian is twice her savior—first when he brings her down from the Mountain when she is a child, and finally when he marries her and provides her unborn child with some degree of legitimacy. But just as important, she herself is charitable, particularly to Lucius Harney, whom she absolves of all responsibility for his actions. To be the object of charity is itself an ambiguous condition, provoking both gratitude and resentment, but Charity Royall both recognizes and practices human compassion, and that fact raises her out of the pathos of her situation. In the end she is trapped in North Dormer, and the Mountain will continue to loom over the town to remind her of her barbarous origins, but though she is without choice, she is not without love. The novel is structured to present two different patterns of movement . The dominant pattern takes Charity first out of the narrow, isolated world of North Dormer and then back into that world. The second movement ameliorates the final grimness of the first by easing Charity closer to lawyer Royall. The first design is rendered primarily in the imagery and settings of the novel; the second is conveyed in three key conversations between Charity and her guardian, the occasions of his three proposals of marriage. In the dominant pattern of movement in the novel, Charity inhabits , actually or imaginatively, three distinct worlds. Most primitive is the Mountain, from which, at the age of five, she...

The Decline of Political Legitimacy in Zambia: An Explanation Based on Incomplete Data

Zambia, like all African countries, is experiencing significant political, economic, and social change. The Zambian government and ruling party seek to control change and channel it in certain directions, but many aspects of change are not initiated by them and a substantial proportion of these are not to their liking. Politically initiated changes and government reactions to other changes have inevitably affected the legitimacy of the Zambian political system and its major components in the eyes of a wide variety of Zambians. In his contribution to the Social Science Research Council's volume on the crises of political development, Sidney Verba indicates that all such “crises of development” or problems associated with change “would seem always to involve problems of legitimacy as well as one of the other problem areas” (Verba, 1971: 306). Thus it is important to study the effects of change on legitimacy since they will be crucial in determining whether the Zambian government and ruling party will be successful in directing change into the paths they desire. Political legitimacy can be defined as a generalized appraisal of the political system as a whole, its various components, and the policy outputs they produce, which indicates that these objects are appropriate in terms of accepted values and norms. To define legitimacy as a generalized appraisal of appropriateness is to differentiate it from specific appraisals of political structures and policies made in terms of perceived interests. These two types of appraisals are empirically interdependent in the long run, but they can be independent of one another in the short run (Easton, 1965: 267-77). They tend, however, to be very closely related in most new political systems, where most diffuse bases of legitimacy have not had time to develop (Binder et. al., 1971: 90-91, 158, 194, 315-16). A complete description of legitimacy in a political system must indicate who grants what degree of legitimacy to what political objects on the basis of which values and norms.

The symbolic evocation of occupational prestige

symbols form much of the basis for social integration and political acquiescence We agree that people are probably expressing their perceptions of societal values more than their own reservations, especially on questions as ambiguous as those in the NORC survey. There is no opportunity in such a study for the expression of ambivalent feelings about occupations. Attitudinal surveys in general tend to tap only the dominant value system, not ambivalence, latency, or complexity in cognitive structures. Occupational prestige is an abstract value-set, moreover, removed from the concrete problems of daily life. There is usually much greater consensus across a society on abstract issues than on concrete ones. Abstract values are seldom questioned or abandoned because they are so unspecific and so are not challenged by everyday experiences. Yet abstract symbols form much of the basis for social integration and political acquiescence. Much of the agreement across subgroups regarding the occupational prestige scale, then, is an illusory product of the level of abstraction of scale items. It does not necessarily point to genuine consensus in individual rankings of occupational prestige. But the questions remain: Why is there such high agreement among people's perceptions of societal values? It is likely that prestige evaluations are a mixture of factual and normative elements, and that they represent a general consensus respecting the distinctive character of different occupations and the abstract values they produce. What accounts for agreement on this abstract value-set? We must also consider the genesis of the subordinate value-set, the reservations and resentments regarding the prestige scale. How is this ambivalence developed and how do people continue indefinitely to live with it? Because the value dimensions underlying prestige rest partly upon some nonobvious symbolic forms, they are worthy of study. The Perceptual Foundations The dominant value system is the "official" ideology and the justification for reward inequality of a society. It is promulgated through mass institutions---the school system and the mass media. People not only learn it; at one level the vast majority subscribes to it with a greater or lesser degree of commitment because it is the only cohesive, society-wide ideology disseminated to them. Reservations about this framework are localized or privatized and are accorded no such degree of legitimacy in mass institutions. Through the process of taking the role of the "generalized other," people learn to perceive the way society perceives or, more accurately, the way they think society perceives. It is on this foundation that people graft the exceptions and qualifications that they draw from their ties to more specific reference groups. Prestige is a perceptual phenomenon, and perceptions are based on the meanings symbols evoke. The objective characteristics of occupations are not crucial in themselves, though they may become so if they are selected as meaningful in the dominant value system. Thus the relative difficulty, risk, achievement potential, or importance of occupations, to the extent that such dimensions can be measured, are not the salient issues. The perceived difficulty, risk, achievement potential, and importance of different jobs are critical, but that formulation calls attention to the need to specify what accounts for such perceptions. It is revealing that some dimensions of occupations that are in relatively short supply do not serve as justifications for prestige and sometimes undermine it: danger to the incumbent and physical strength, for example. Symbolic Sources of Prestige The relationships among a value-set, its justifications, and its consequences are complex and not easily disentangled. People do not necessarily examine their evaluative beliefs for logical inconsistencies, especially when the beliefs are abstract and have little beating on their daily lives. No doubt one source of prestige perceptions is the material rewards associated with occupations. According to Saul Feldman and Gerald Thielbar, people see prestige as a justification for reward inequalities. At the same time, the symbols of material affluence are a source of prestige in themselves, even when the sources of this affluence are unknown. In her study of fifth and sixth graders in a midwestern community, Bernice L. Neugarten found that upper and upper middle-class children were perceived by their peers to rate high on traits such as good looks, liking for school, leadership, friendship, and other favorable characteristics. On the same dimensions, lower-class children were rated low. Status symbols are bases of prestige precisely because of this circular reasoning process. Joan Huber and William H. Form found that capitalist societies, especially the United States, tend not to support

Viewpoint

How exactly does one interpret the term ‘User Education’ and how is it best done? These are questions which still puzzle me after two years of working at them.Rigid interpretation of User Education as chalk and talk stand-up teaching (‘class contact’) can reduce it to apolitical hour counting activity, useful for promotion but guaranteed to get least response from students.Whilst I think that teaching methods are all important in User Education I would argue that they must be appropriate to the activity and not imposed for the sake of form. You can’t, for example, write a series of Information Retrieval lectures into a course submission document and expect them to work because they have a degree of legitimacy. The activity may be best treated informally.

Mark's Understanding of History

A century of intense research on Mark has largely failed to reach generally accepted conclusions either as to the theology of Mark, or as to the degree of legitimacy and the methodology of using Mark as a source for discussing Jesus. This confusion in Marcan research is due in large measure to a failure to reach clarity as to Mark's understanding of history, a problem which should logically have been resolved before any attempt was made to use Mark as a historical source for the study of Jesus. The nineteenth century, reaching its climax in H. J. Holtzmann, assumed that since Mark was the earliest gospel it was most historical, i.e. that Mark wrote history with much the same presuppositions as did the modern historian. History consists in the interaction of human wills and actions, and is to be explained by locating the causal connexions in the intentions and actions of men. For example, Mark 6.14–29 records the beheading of John by Herod; the next paragraph records Jesus withdrawing to privacy for rest with the disciples. Mark was assumed to mean—although remarkably enough he in no word hinted it—that one event followed chronologically upon the other and was caused by the other.