Dominant Social Groups Research Articles

Applying White Dialectics: Exploring Whiteness and Racial Identity among White College Athletes

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to synthesize and apply White racial identity theory and concomitant research to the interaction between athletic and racial identity, specifically as it relates to the experiential variations of how race impacts White athletes within the college sport environment. White dialectics, or the tensions that White Americans experience as dominant social group members, serve as the guiding theoretical framework and provide a theoretical lens through which the experience of White college athletes is examined at each distinct dialectic. Through this article, the application of White dialectics offers a theoretical foundation for developing a better understanding of how White college athletes not only make sense of their racial identity, but also understand their racialized experiences within intercollegiate athletics.

“Which Men?” How an Intersectional Perspective on Men and Masculinities Helps Explain Women's Political Underrepresentation

Progress toward gender equality in politics is striking. With the help of electoral gender quotas in more than 130 countries, women's national legislative representation more than doubled in the last 20 years. Other historically marginalized groups—racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples—are also increasingly making their way into our parliaments. Political institutions are, then, more inclusive today than they have ever been. Yet equal representation has not been fully realized: some marginalized groups have seen a decline, and men from dominant social and economic groups—hereafter “elite men”—remain numerically dominant. Globally, there are no known cases in which elite men do not hold a disproportionately high share of positions in national elective office (Hughes 2015).

(De)constructing the Masculine Blueprint: The Institutional and Discursive Consequences of Male Political Dominance

Men are overrepresented in most legislatures of the world. However, in parliaments in which women reach a “critical mass” or even approach parity with men in terms of numbers, they still must contend with and adapt to the symbolic representation of men. Using the cases of the Australian and Polish parliaments, we point to the need to deconstruct the parliamentary standard by shifting the theoretical and empirical focus from women's disadvantage in politics to problematizing men's advantage and power (Eveline 1994, 1998; Murray 2014). Rather than placing the problem and solution with women, we address the practices that maintain men's unearned power, or privilege. Privilege is the “systematically conferred advantages” that individuals enjoy by virtue of their membership of a dominant social group (Bailey 1998, 109). Institutions in the form of taken-for-granted practices and gendered discourses embed a “masculine blueprint” in political institutions that legitimizes men's place as parliamentarians and privileges men, enhancing their power and advantage in the election process. By focusing on men's dominance, it becomes evident that sustaining gender inequality through practices and discourse advantages men as a group.

Language Policy and Its Consequences on Sindhi Language Teaching in Sindh, Pakistan

This paper examines the language teaching policy in Pakistan and its consequences on Sindhi language in Sindh province. The paper argues that such language policy has attempted to marginalize other local and indigenous languages of the country in general and Sindhi language in particular. Politics is actively engaged in determining the status of languages in the country. English and Urdu being the languages of the dominant social group, that is, the ruling elite in the country enjoy status of official and national languages respectively whereas languages of the marginalized group are excluded from the domain of education, literacy and power. The paper, thus, draws attention of the language policy makers to linguistic human rights and argues that all the languages should be treated equally. Education being inborn right of human being should be acquired in one’s own mother tongue; this is the only solution to cope with present and future challenges in Pakistani educational system.

In Defence of Sustho Sanskriti (Healthy Culture): Understanding Bengali Middle Classness in Neoliberal India

The ‘new middle class’, often identified as an upwardly mobile segment, primarily employed in the growing private service sectors, such as the information technology, and supposedly, representative of the changing lifestyles and consumption patterns of the Indian middle class, has stolen much of the limelight of the contemporary popular as well as scholarly discourses on the Indian middle class. 2 2 This article draws upon from the fieldwork conducted as part of my PhD work completed in 2016. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the international seminar on ‘The Middle Class in World Society’ held at ISEC (Institute of Social and Economic Change), Bangalore, India on 16th and 17th December, 2016. This article, on the other hand, takes up a different social group located in West Bengal, having a close relationship with the state, often described as the ‘old middle class’/‘Nehruvian middle class’ in the postcolonial context, the respondents being predominantly public sector employees and academicians. By taking up the register of sanskriti (culture), the article argues that it is fundamentally through forging continuity from the past that this historically dominant social group is engaged in the construction of Bengali middle classness. Through an analysis of class and its relation to cultural distinctiveness, the article shows that the specific way in which this relation plays out in case of the respondents in my study and argues that any theoretical attempt to understand the complex relationship between class distinction and the question of taste needs to be grounded within narrowly defined contextualised specificities.

Fragmentation and Weakening of States: Instruments of Global Domination

The dual role of states (utility and threat), their embodiment of the interests of the dominant social groups, the competition and belligerency between states, and their interaction with other economical and social institutions as big corporations give special relevance to the relative size of states and to the theoretical conception of states and their relationships, particularly to their fragmentation or destruction in a perspective of global domination—often under an apparently progressive invocation of the self-determination right (promoting independentism and fractional nationalism) and democracy. In this context, we underline the dominance of the oligarchic-imperial ideology, in its different variations, even over some expressions of the new postmodernist left and the double global-imperial policy of dismembering non-hegemonic states, on one hand, and weakening of the state institution, usurping some of its traditional functions (particularly those related to a direct economic role) even inside the hegemonic states.

The transformative potential of counter accounts: a case study of animal rights activism

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamics and transformative potential associated with counter accounts. It explores how counter-accountants’ attempts to rearticulate animal production result in their own identity becoming constructed during the conflict setting and how this identity subsequently relates to the transformative potential of the counter accounts.Design/methodology/approachThe paper investigates counter accounts released during an animal rights activists’ campaign against industrial meat and dairy production in Finland. The counter accounts, consisting of secretly filmed videos from pig farms, contrasted the official depiction of animal farming and received wide publicity over several years. The main empirical data set consists of 21 interviews with a variety of parties that have a stake in the conflict. This data set is supplemented with a broad set of published documentary material.FindingsThe authors find that the counter accounts managed, to some extent, to rearticulate the meaning of animal production, potentially resulting in the emergence of small-scale societal effects. When trying to undermine the counter-accountants’ radical political demand, the dominant social groups not only dismissed the counter accounts but also attempted to constitute the counter-accountants’ identity as irresponsible, militant and negligent, drawing a firm political boundary between “them” and “us.” Likewise, the counter-accountants seemed reluctant to communicate with representatives of the dominant regime, resulting in an antagonistic as opposed to an agonistic relationship between the two political groups. The paper also discusses ethical questions concerning the production of counter accounts, the importance of having a clearly articulated political vision, and the challenges related to evaluating whether the counter accounts have been successful.Originality/valueThe paper provides insights into the design, use and reception of counter accounts in a real-life social setting, thus providing a direct response to a recent call by Thomson et al. (2015). The paper illustrates the usefulness of the conceptual dynamic conflict arena framework presented by Thomson et al. (2015), and makes use of discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Laclau, 2005, 2001, 1996) to highlight how in exploring the transformative potential of counter accounts it is necessary to also consider how the identity of the counter-accountants becomes constructed and understood. Furthermore, the paper also seeks to advance the connections between accounting research and significant global problems by investigating an ethically and environmentally disputed industry, and by engaging with the interrelationships between accounts and accountability in the context of socio-ecological change.

Dominant Social Identity Work: Exploring Identity Management among Members of Dominant Groups

More work is needed to understand the underlying motivations that encourage members of dominant social groups to consider challenging systems of inequality that protect their group as well as how their privilege affects their own sense of well-being. This symposium brings together new scholarship that explores the ways in which people with membership in dominant social groups manage, construct, enact, and make sense of their identities within and across organizations as well as society more generally. Through this discussion we want to raise new questions that explore how and when members of dominant social groups might engage in identity work that either maintains or challenges the status quo and how this identity work affects their sense of well-being.

"Social Exclusion and Common Property Resource Management in South India: An Analysis of Community Forest Management in Andhra Pradesh "

in the context of high growth driven economy, the concept of social exclusion and inclusion acquired significance in academic and public policy circles. Most of studies on social exclusion focused on urban based exclusion and rural developmental interventions are not being given due attention. This article attempts to assess the performance of community forest management scheme from the prescriptive of social seclusion. Attempt is being made to indentify the multiple sources and process of social exclusion in the operational process of community forest management scheme in Andhra Pradesh and thereby locating the spaces for inclusion of excluded. The general trend is sample villages is that social exclusion of people is explicitly visible and this is product of collaborative effort of the nexus between forest department, and dominant social groups in village.

‘Epistemological diversity’ in education: Philosophical and didactic considerations

A recent but widespread view holds that ethnic or cultural groups have their own distinctive epistemologies, that epistemologies are also gendered, and that these have been largely ignored by the dominant social group. A corollary of this view states that educational research is pursued within a framework that represents particular assumptions about knowledge and knowledge production that reflect the interests and historical traditions of this dominant group. The call for epistemological diversity becomes problematic when it conflates epistemological pluralism and epistemological relativism. More often than not, in such arguments for different, diverse, alternative, decolonized or demasculinized epistemologies some relevant philosophical issues remain unresolved, if not unaddressed altogether. What exactly do these claims about epistemological diversity mean? Do these ways of establishing knowledge stand up to critical interrogation? Moreover, how do they relate to traditional epistemological distinctions, e.g. between knowledge and belief and between descriptive and normative inquiry, and to epistemologically essential components like warrant/justification and truth? This paper examines some of the mistakes and misconceptions involved in appeals to diverse epistemologies. The concern is not just whether or not a word (‘epistemology’) is being misused, but also (and importantly) whether or not the issues dealt with in epistemology (a complex field that has evolved over a long period of time) are being given short shrift, if not ignored altogether.

Law’s Symbolic Power: Beyond the Marxist Conception of Ideology

The aim of this paper is to show the symbolic dimension of power developed by Pierre Bourdieu which is simultaneously an insightful break with the well-known Marxist conception of ideology. Bourdieu’s theory is concerned with a profound reflection on relations of power, and particularly the unmasking of those relations that might be deemed as “misrecognised” (ergo, hidden and socially accepted). This is a concept of symbolic power that can be understood as misrecognised and perceived as legitimate authority, or paradoxically denied power. It is a capacity to construct the social reality on the terms of dominant social groups and powerful social institutions, including the institution of law and lawyers. The distinction between “sociodicy” (justification of the social word) and “ideology” is a key element for Bourdieu. Agents of the legal field cannot be simply perceived as a cynical. It is not a “false consciousness” that brings them to impose their symbolic power upon society. The operation of symbolic power is not an instrumental power whereby lawyers intentionally try to impose some propaganda. This power is inscribed both in their dispositions (habitus) and social structure (legal field).

Finding Pathways to More Equitable and Meaningful Public-Scientist Partnerships

For many, citizen science is exciting because of the possibility for more diverse, equitable partnerships in scientific research with outcomes considered meaningful and useful by all, including public participants. This was the focus of a symposium we organized at the 2015 conference of the Citizen Science Association. Here we synthesize points made by symposium participants and our own reflections. Professional science has a participation problem that is part of a larger equity problem in society. Inequity in science has negative consequences including a failure to address the needs and goals arising from diverse human and social experiences, for example, lack of attention to issues such as environmental contamination that disproportionately impact under-represented populations, and a failure to recognize the pervasive effects of structural racism. Inequity also encourages mistrust of science and scientists. A perception that science is practiced for the sole benefit of dominant social groups is reinforced when investigations of urgent community concerns such as hydraulic fracturing are questioned as being biased endeavors. Defined broadly, citizen science can challenge and change this inequity and mistrust, but only if it reflects the diversity of publics, and if it doesn’t reinforce existing inequities in science and society. Key will be the way that science is portrayed: Acknowledging the presence of bias in all scientific research and the tools available for minimizing this, and demonstrating the utility of science for local problem solving and policy change. Symposium participants called for reflexive research, mutual learning, and other methods for supporting more equitable engagement in practice and in the activities of the Citizen Science Association.

A Comparison of Goal Setting and Reputational Orientations of African Adolescents From Refugee Backgrounds in Intensive English Centers and Mainstream Secondary School Classrooms

We compared the goals, reputations and behaviours of three groups: African adolescents from refugee backgrounds in Australian Intensive English Centres (IEC), African adolescents who have transitioned from an IEC into mainstream schooling, and Australian mainstream adolescents. We posit the need for African adolescents from refugee backgrounds to identify with the dominant social group within the IEC and mainstream settings is important for the goals they set, the reputations they choose, and the manner in which they pursue them. To this end, we conducted a cross sectional comparison through Reputation Enhancing Goals Theory, an approach congruent with sociocultural adaptation. We found African adolescents in IEC contexts set academic goals associated with a conforming reputation, whereas African adolescents in mainstream schooling set social goals associated with a non-conforming reputation. Australian mainstream students had an equal split between academic and social goals and conforming/non-conforming reputations. Each of the three groups indulged in behaviours congruent with the goals set and reputation sought. A series of multiple-mediation models revealed significant indirect effects on a number of variables via School Connectedness, Control over most important goal, and to a lesser extent Goals. African adolescents in mainstream schooling attempt to adapt to another dominant culture (i.e., mainstream peers) on transitioning from IEC, but face confusion about who they are and who they wish to be. The implications for adolescents from African refuge backgrounds is, that while placing them in IECs for up to two years is laudable, further support is needed when they transition to mainstream schooling.

Dangers of Decentralisation in Urban Slums: A Comparative Study of Water Supply and Drainage Service Delivery in Kolkata, India

Clientelism may lead to the underprovision of services which are deemed suitable for decentralisation. Water distribution and drainage services, managed from a lower level of municipal authority, are liable to be affected by clientelism and consequent underprovision. Water quality, maintained from a higher municipal layer, is not likely to be affected by clientelism. Capture by politically influential and dominant social and religious groups is likely to take place for important services like water supply. The article suggests that awareness, measurability, importance and resource intensiveness of service are additional factors to be considered for assessing the suitability of a sector for decentralisation.

Love’s Exemplars: A Response to Gupta, Earp, and Savulescu

Love’s ExemplarsA Response to Gupta, Earp, and Savulescu Andrew McGee (bio) I am grateful to Brian Earp, Julian Savulescu, and Kristina Gupta for their thoughtful remarks on my paper. I cannot answer all of their points here, but select what I consider to be the most important. Gupta believes that I commit myself to “a common sense” account of love. This is not so. “Common sense” refers to beliefs, not concepts. Concepts can be used to express true, false, and diametrically opposed beliefs, so are not themselves beliefs; rather, they are the logical precondition for holding beliefs. When I say, “red is a color,” I am not advocating on behalf of common sense, still less making a claim held by any “dominant social group.” Suppose Gupta disagrees and says, “The red-green color-blind do not regard red as a color.” But this is only to say that they do not share the concept of red, which is a precondition to disagreement about the use of the concept (say, whether a rose is red or not). The same point applies in the case of the concept of love. This does not mean that people cannot, sometimes, disagree about how far a concept extends. Again, such disagreement presupposes an understanding of those instances of a concept about which there is no dispute (what I called its exemplars). It is not clear why Gupta thinks my arguments imply that embroidery is not an exemplar of art, nor why she thinks that I only count heterosexual love as love. Readers will search in vain for anything to that effect in my paper. Gupta wisely does not deny that there are exemplars about which people are not in dispute. Imagine if people disagreed about whether any exemplars of red were really red. How could we even have the concept of red in such a case? We need to know what counts as red to have a disagreement about whether a particular shade is red or not. Similarly, we may disagree about how far the concept of a game extends, but someone who doubted that Scrabble is a game is not being admirably open-minded. Adding that it is only a game for the “dominant social group” can only mean it is not a game in other social groups, not that it does not count as a game in any social group. Related remarks apply to Earp and Savulescu’s claim that their own preference is to remain “relatively agnostic” about what love “really is.” How far should we take this agnosticism? Should we equally remain agnostic about what fear is? What a smile is? Should we be more qualified when we teach these concepts to our children? It makes sense to be agnostic about what dark matter is, but not what love is. Gupta makes much of my throwaway phrase, “love properly so-called.” The context for my using that phrase should be borne in mind. For example, my remark was made to rebut the common but mistaken view that love is an appetite. Love, unlike lust, is not an appetite, but an affection, because love can take a specific object whereas appetites take formal objects, and love [End Page 101] does not cease even when I am with the beloved whereas hunger ceases once I have eaten (Bennett & Hacker, 2003). A person’s fetish for cow manure is not a fetish for this particular piece of cow dung, but for cow dung as such, whereas someone’s love for a person is for this person (a point that, as Earp and Savulescu note, does not commit me to seeing love as only monogamous). Any manure will do, whereas you cannot console a person who loses their partner in a car crash by saying, “It’s OK, there are plenty more fish in the sea!” I agree with Earp and Savulescu that we need to be careful about the value-laden use of some distinctions, such as the ‘healthy’ ‘unhealthy’ distinction. But that does not mean we cannot use these concepts at all (as they concede). It is easy to over-intellectualize. Suppose Gupta, Earp, and Savulescu invite a best friend out...

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Deaf HERstory: Making Strides

EmergenceTo maintain dominance over a minority group, the dominant social group deprives its victims of their history. Frantz Fanon, a leader of the Algerian resistance to French rule in the 1950s, wrote that colonialism is not satisfied with merely holding a people in its grip ... but by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of an oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.1 Prevented from appreciating the historical experiences and the achievements of their own people, the colonized are kept powerless. Because African Americans have long understood this deprivation, a civil-rights movement occurred in the mid-twentieth century.This evoked a sense of social consciousness leading to the formation of Black studies.2 A domino effect ensued, and women's studies, disability studies, Chicano/a studies, and other disciplines began to evolve. According to historian Gerda Lerner, being denied equal opportunities brought forth the field of women's studies, which also was engendered by the need to improve women's lives.-3Like the impetus for black studies and women's studies, the field of Deaf studies emerged from the now-famous discovery of the linguistic nature of American Sign Language (ASL) in the mid-1960s.4 The first formal Deaf studies program was created in 1980 at Boston University and was followed by similar initiatives at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), in 1983. Initially a department at Gallaudet University in 1994, Deaf studies became a program when it merged with the ASL program in 2002.Studies of Deaf women began in 1993, when Vicki Hurwitz offered the first Deaf women's studies course at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) as part of her master's degree program in social work.6 The course, which was a historical review of Deaf women's professional and personal lives, included a field trip to the Women's National Hall of Fame Museum in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1996, the next Deaf women's studies course emerged at CSUN with Genie Gertz, who saw a serious gap in the field of Deaf studies.7 Her course consisted of a multidisciplinary analysis of Deaf women in both the Deaf community and American society. Studies of historical, social, political, educational, and economic factors that affected the status of Deaf women were incorporated into Gertz's class.The course included discussions about Deaf women's struggles and successes and examined historical accounts of Deaf women in the context of the Deaf community.Inspired by both Hurwitz and Gertz, I began the first Deaf women's studies course at Gallaudet in 1997. An additional impetus was a general lack of reading materials on the experiences of Deaf females in my women's studies classes at the University of Maryland. In that first Deaf women's studies course at Gallaudet, I quickly learned that the students had no prior knowledge of general herstory,8 forcing a shuffle in the course syllabus. Since then, the course has begun with a brief exploration of hearing herstory, covering suffrage, first with Susan B. Anthony and her cohorts in the late nineteenth century, and later with Alice Paul in the early twentieth century, and finally with activist Betty Friedan in the mid-twentieth century.This course invariably includes a visit to the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument, in which Alice Paul and colleagues lived and worked diligently to cinch the 1920 suffrage victory After this introduction the students shift into an exploration of social, educational, and gendered issues among Deaf women. Finding this approach to be useful in introducing women's studies to the students, I continue to use this strategy two decades later, starting the semester with a quick exploration of hearing herstory and ending with a look into the experiences of Deaf females, especially those of Gallaudet alumnae.ResourcesIn addition to realizing that students had no prior knowledge of general herstory, a dearth of published materials, specifically books about, for, and by Deaf women was another challenge in teaching Deaf women's studies classes. …

Metaphorical Conceptualization of Migration Control Laws

This article analyzes the way in which migration control laws are metaphorically conceptualized in the voices of individuals who demonstrate emotional solidarity with irregular immigrants. The metaphors studied are shown to constitute a coherent conceptual corpus that reveals their users’ ideology. These metaphors present a cultural narrative that affects the moral consideration of the characters involved in the story. They also reflect the perception of those who feel oppressed by the dominant social group and therefore, they are narratives of oppression, in juxtaposition to the narratives of hegemony that can be identified in the metaphors used in hostile political speeches against this social group.

Military, ‘managers’ and hegemonies of management accounting controls: A critical realist interpretation

The paper brings to light the horizontal dimension of hegemony, i.e. the relationship between dominant social groups as they form a ‘power bloc’ and its significance for management accounting control (MAC) changes, drawing on an intensive case study of a public sector unit in Pakistan. The study finds that the political strategies of the two dominant social groups eventually led to a ‘conflicted compromise’, resulting in changes to the MACs in the case organisation. However, the ideologies of both groups were seriously compromised vis-à-vis the enacted MACs. This necessitated the use of coercive measures to compel the dominated groups, such as lower pay-grade employees and labour, to accept the changes. We argue that the use of coercive measures without ideological support resulted in a weak hegemonic arrangement at the level of the firm, with implications for possible resistance from the dominated groups and for the longevity of the MAC changes. The paper is informed by a critical realist interpretation of hegemony which helps improve our understanding of the role of the state in bringing about MAC changes. Based on our analysis, we argue that it would be useful not only to trace the economic compulsions of the state but also to examine the vested interests of powerful social groups engaged in hegemonic struggles within the state for better understanding of NPM-driven MAC changes in an SOE.

Analysing meritocratic (in)equality in Singapore: ideology, curriculum and reproduction

In this article I first discuss how in Singapore the concept of meritocracy captures both elitist and egalitarian aspirations, and the ways in which its education policies have for a long time vacillated between these conflicting dimensions. I then argue that critical studies of meritocracy need to go beyond an understanding of the term as an inherently unstable concept instantiated problematically in policy and practice. Rather, as I develop the argument further, the dynamics of meritocracy needs to be appreciated as an ideology that is negotiated by dominant social groups as these seek to legitimize particular distributions of social resources. Such dominant ideologies, however, are not only produced in the education system; they are also reproduced through it, often in far more complex ways. To see how these ideologies and their tensions animate the very mechanism that sits at the centre of the reproduction of (in)equality, viz. the curriculum, the rest of the article provides an account of how one particular subject area is differently taught in an elite and a mainstream school.