Elitist Structure Research Articles

DYNAMICS OF THE MERITOCRACY TRAP AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

In this study, Daniel Markovitz's book titled "The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite," published by Penguin Press, is thoroughly evaluated in the context of the dynamics of the meritocracy trap and the two distinct phases it contains. The first phase corresponds to a period when the education system and the labor market were open to everyone. During this phase, human capital could be equally invested in through education. However, from the 1970s onwards, the spread of automation due to technological transformations eliminated this advantage for the middle class, either displacing middle and low-skilled workers from the labor market or condemning them to lower wages. While the middle class was replaced by automation, the elite class began to own the high-skilled and consequently high-yielding jobs created by automation. In this transformation, the education systems once again revealed their elitist structure, creating a new elite educational option only accessible to wealthy families, strongly linked to elite jobs in the labor market. The study also discusses the potential of artificial intelligence technologies to move these dynamics into a third phase. The proliferation of artificial intelligence technologies has dynamics similar to those that moved the meritocratic system into the second phase, greatly strengthening automation. Therefore, this study discusses how artificial intelligence technologies can be used not merely to strengthen automation but to focus on employment and enhance the skills of particularly middle and low-skilled workers in workplaces, complementing human labor and increasing overall productivity.

Hidden elitism: the meritocratic discourse of free choice in Finnish music education system

ABSTRACT This study presents an analysis of hidden elitism in music education through the free choice argument – that individuals are fundamentally free to choose to study music – as a meritocratic power structure. Qualitative Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is applied to understand music education as a social system with a special structure in which its purpose regulates its functions and makes them meaningful in a given social setting through discourse. The study shows how free choice can appear both as a democratic principle and a legitimising discursive mechanism restricting the enactment of equality. Through a case, the study then demonstrates, first, how the relationship between the meritocratic discourse of free choice and hidden elitism can be identified by using SSM in the context of Finnish music education system, and second, how professionals can bridge social systems and transgress hidden elitist structures.

Seeking the Subaltern Consciousness in Nepali Cinema

This article overviews the resistance of the subaltern and the ongoing debate on seeking the subaltern consciousness within and outside the elitist structure. The first part of this article exposes the notion of subaltern and subaltern resistance consciousness concerning the development of the Nepali film industry. The second part discusses different dimensions of resistance of the subaltern in shifting politico-cultural contexts. It also unfolds the structure of representation of the subaltern transformed within transitions which are observed more vehemently through the different politico-cultural scenarios of filmmaking, particularly before and after the Maoist insurgency. The last part analyses the aspects or efforts of the self-formation of the subaltern in terms of- along with class- caste, ethnicity and gender with references to representative Nepali movies, i.e. Numafung, Batomuniko Phool and Uma flash hope within hopelessness.

Literacidad e Identidades en las Investigaciones sobre Formación Docente en Brasil

This paper intends to account for several criteria and principles guiding the cre-ation of research programs carried out in Brazil from 1991 on, by researchers in the field of applied linguistics in the literacy studies approach. This approach aimed to help transform out-of-date and elitist structures in Education (like, for example, language curricula at Brazilian higher education). One of those pioneering groups was Letramento do Professor, which applied Street’s new para-digm (1984). This review also looks at new studies that gradually began adhering to the sociocultural and historic trend of literacy studies. Our main source of information to access those works was Lattes Brazil’s Research Group Directory, an agency under the umbrella of the National Research Council (cnpq), which has 512 research groups registered, which are doing or have done research on literacy. In line with the varied research subjects in literacy studies, namely rela-tions between literacy and power, effects of representations on written language among the most vulnerable social groups, in different settings, the theoretical grounds of those research works are examined here, including interactionist the-ories of language, cultural studies, decolonial theories, and literacy studies, with methodological approaches gathering together varied interpretative practices.

Private order building: the state in the role of the civil society and the case of FIFA

There is an ever-present danger that a private association may evolve into an enterprise with an elitist structure that extensively exploits its powers. While it is well known that the key role in limiting the excessive powers of state elites belongs to civil society, the question of policing the elites of monopolistic private orders is understudied. We use the case of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) private order to illustrate how private orders evolve under constraints imposed by public orders. Although private ordering has advantages compared to public ordering, much of the credit for the success of FIFA’s private order goes to the state. Regulatory privileges granted to FIFA, and the refusal to intervene widely in FIFA’s affairs, have made private ordering possible in the first place. The challenge is, however, that private association capture by powerful interest groups can easily limit advantages of private ordering. In this situation, the proper role of the state is to act in the role of civil society by employing strategic interventions to help the private order deal with its governance failures without endangering the private order’s existence. Accordingly, when the power within a monopolistic private membership association becomes heavily imbalanced, it invites the state to intervene in an attempt to restore the lost balance. However, opening the door to the state—as in the case of so-called FIFA-gate—increases the danger that other and greater interventions will undermine the existence of the private order and remove its advantages.

Ethnicity, gender, deprivation and low educational attainment in England: Political arithmetic, ideological stances and the deficient society

Attainment data on England’s school pupils are more extensive in coverage, detail, quantity, accessibility and of higher quality than monitoring statistics routinely available in other European countries. These data facilitate investigation of low attainment in England’s schools and its relationship to ethnicity, gender and poverty. This article reviews longitudinal sample studies and extends this with simpler presentations of England’s national attainment statistics for education over 5 years up to 2014. The analyses show recurrent correlations of low attainment with specific ethnic minority groups, with gender and most strongly with low-income sections of society. There is a strong case, from these data and other research, that these inequalities are rooted in social and economic factors outside the school, created and sustained by neoliberal economic practices and elitist structures. It is argued that reducing the proportion of children growing up in poverty will have a bigger impact on raising average attainment levels than focusing on in-school factors.

The Italian way to financial accumulation. Personal networks and informal practices of the Italian economic elites

This paper challenges the belief that Italian capitalism is a static and unchanging one. Italian capitalism has retained some unique characteristics: an elitist structure, close personal relationships, a high degree of informality. However, far from being just the characteristics of an unchanging capitalism, these peculiarities were the resources that Italian capitalism exploited to change its mode of action. First, we identify the network of interlocking actors in the Italian stock market and their set of informal practices, illustrating the paramount role of families and informal relationships. Second, we show why these characteristics did not prevent Italian capitalists to enter an era of financial accumulation. Resilience is the keyword, understood both as adaptation to changing conditions and as active reaction, a proper transformation. As an example of adaptation, we analyse how Italian capitalism has faced some institutional changes preserving its traditional power structure. As an example of transformation, we show how Italian capitalism adopted patterns of financial accumulation and maximization of shareholder value. Finally, we argue that informality and the dissemination of personal relationships are not impediment to change: in the practical logic of social and economic actors they are rather resources to be exploited when it comes to make changes without sacrificing the status quo.

A Sociological Counter-reading of Marie Chauvet as an “Outsider-Within”: Paradoxes in the Construction of Haitian Women in Love, Anger, Madness

As a sociologist trained to analyze social reality in search of ways to transform it, I am always puzzled by the way literary scholars portray Marie Chauvet, to use the trope of Patricia Hill Collins, as an outsiderwithin.1 Such a situation of dual identity is created through engagement with one's position within a community as well as exclusion or strangeness from that community. To use an anthropological idiom, Chauvet could be considered as a writer reflexive of her own social reality. Indeed, many literary scholars define Chauvet's work as a critique of both the political system of the Duvalierist regime of 1957-1987 and the discriminatory practices of the Haitian oligarchy, the elite to which generations of Chauvet's family, including herself, belonged by birth and/or through marriage. That tradition of social critique has been a hallmark in Haitian literature starting with the Indigenist school of the nineteenth century and continuing in the works ofjacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, the two most successful male Haitian writers of the twentieth century. Yet for many, Chauvet is unique because, as Joan Dayan states, Never before had a Haitian woman dared not only to question the nationalist assumptions of Francois Duvalier and the noiriste celebration of'black essence' but also to take on the burden of writing in a culture that had simultaneously praised and silenced women.2This praise of Chauvet, which comes from many corners, is paradoxically not based on her own political engagement. Rather, her association with some form of radicalism is based on the of her literary works. For example, the well-known Haitian American writer, Edwidge Danticat, honoring Chauvet as one of the three giants of Haitian literature, claims that Chauvet seems to be speaking to us . . . from the grave in assessing and criticizing the current sociopolitical conditions of life in contemporary Haiti.3 Another Haitian American writer, Myriam Chancy, in a provocative article titled Exile and Resistance: History as a Revolutionary Act, also claims that Chauvet's work-like that of the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff-focus [es] on the role of women and how politically conscious women negotiate their sexual oppression within social and class constraints.4 For Chancy, both writers present in their work the possibilities for resistance as represented by women through history. Such resistance is revelatory of women's efforts to free themselves of prescribed social roles as breeders, mothers, nannies, and laborers.Celebrations of the revolutionary and transformative nature of Chauvet's work contribute to a process of myth-making. Literary scholars such as Hellen Lee-Keller argue not only that Chauvet criticized despotism and racialized social hierarchies but also that the reason her book was banned was that she questioned and condemned the patriarchal and elitist structure of Haitian society. Lee-Keller further states that Chauvet uses the trope of madness as her primary strategy for navigating the political sphere, thus creating an alternative future vision for women's roles in Haiti.5 Likewise, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw speaks about the boldness and perspective of Chauvet's work, stating that the writer courageously exposed the politics of Duvalier's terrorizing regime and that her work moves beyond Haitian reality and the Haitian border. Chauvet's use of the first-person narrative, she claims, seemed to say what others stifled.6 Another literary critic, Melissa Sande, uses Chauvet's work as the framework for her analysis of gender and literature in post-earthquake Haiti.7 Lastly, although Kaiama Glover acknowledges Chauvet5 s absence from-and, most likely, her refusal to participate in-any form of organized politics of Black radicalism or of women's struggles, she finds a redemptive explanation.8 She claims that Chauvet was literally punished, removed from the pantheon, excluded, silenced partly because of her political decision to be nonaligned. …

Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law. By Mark D. West. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. 259 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law. By Mark D. West. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. 259 pp. $29.95 cloth.Expressions of matter greatly in our lives. But how do and emotions shape the processes of trials and legal decisions by professional judges once our relationships face serious problems and turn into tragedies? In Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law, Mark D. West introduces us to a new side of the judiciary. Comparing and contrasting equivalent cases and situations in the United States with his careful analyses of 2,700 Japanese court opinions in the 1990s and 2000s, West reveals judges' particular world views of sex, and marriage, and ultimately of law and society in Japan (p. 7). The book also presents demographic data and public opinions from the government's national statistics, studies by Japan scholars, and the author's interviews with Japanese legal specialists. Drawing on these sources, West contributes not simply to our understanding of an official legal perspective on sex, and marriage, or of the judicial world in Japan; his work also guides us to consider how cultural conceptualizations of intimacy and the institutional arrangements of judiciaries influence the ways cases play out in the legal arena.West argues that the concept of love, which we typically do not associate with legal decision making, plays a striking role in judicial verdicts and judges' reasoning in Japan. He recognizes that many Japanese are relatively reserved in expressing the feelings of love verbally in their personal interactions, let alone in public. The study starts with the assumption that Japanese judges do not concern themselves with legally trivial matters of the heart (p. 10). Yet, in his analysis of legal reports and interviews with lawyers and judges, West demonstrates that love-related expressions often appear unexpectedly and shape the outcomes of cases; and surprisingly, matters most in criminal cases rather than in cases about marriage and divorce. West conceptualizes his rather astonishing findings on judicial commentaries with an introduction and analysis of the judicial system and, in particular, the judge's career path in Japan-an extremely homogeneous, age-graded, and elitist structure. West also provides a valuable description of popular and gendered understandings of love as pain and suffering in Japan, in marked contrast to American conceptions of as warm and caring, a positive necessity in life. …

Punch Drunk on Research Impact: A Critical Analysis of Textual Power Politics

Defined by Research Councils UK as ‘the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy’, impact is a measure of achievement. Academics are required to predict impact as part of the process of obtaining funding for research, so it is now a measure of the value of research. This article outlines the linguistic and etymological origins of the word ‘impact’ in order to highlight and investigate the power basis of meanings embedded in a word that tends to be used as if it were a neutral term. The article employs a narrative style in order to investigate for whom, particularly within the academic world, impact functions. It discusses how the power politics in play relate to the ways in which funding operates in higher education and the ways in which that is governed by medical science and industry world views, which have become part of managerial institutional culture. It locates the shock of ‘impact’ as a symbolic marker of a postmodern crisis, a collision point within universities between positivist managerial values, science-and-technology-based funding frameworks, research and teaching, which is largely ignored. Impact reproduces elitist structures that could ultimately damage the values held within higher education as communities of learning and practice.

Iran’s Long Reach

This short analytical book attempts to serve American decision-maker policychoices with respect to the “pivotal” country of Iran. The pivotal state thesishas sought to organize the United States’ national security strategy after thecollapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.1Maloney applies itto the Iranian case, given that country’s geostrategic value and significant rolein global issues and negotiations (pp. 4-5). She adopts the thesis’ mainassumption that by investing attention and resources in regional heavyweights,the United States can benefit from the “multiplier” effect of theirweight. Arguing that as the United States seeks to change its strategicapproach toward the region, the author posits that focusing on the Muslimworld’s pivotal states will help prioritize challenges and opportunities andthus better serve its vital interests (p. 5). She proceeds to do so by making thecase for Iran’s crucial importance while outlining what she perceives to be itspolitical, economic, security and theological dilemmas – presumably so thatWashington and its allies can take advantage of them.The study also attempts to examine the shifts from reformist (Khatami)toward more radical (Ahmadinejad) politics in Iran’s domestic scene. Shetraces the reasons why the Iranian “reform movement,” under Khatamifailed and attributes that outcome to self-imposed constraints (redlines), fearof bringing about instability, and the movement’s elitist structure (pp. 12-13). Maloney also points to Ahmadinejad’s “perverse” but “compelling”incentive to preserve the long-standing antagonism toward the UnitedStates. She expresses her concern that such shifts may serve to undermineany remaining international consensus necessary to address “problematicelements of Iran’s foreign policy” (p. 23) ...

The Pearl Necklace: Toward an Archaeology of Brazilian Transition Discourse.

In his book-length publication in English, Roberto Reis re-evaluates the Brazilian literary canon, stressing the authoritarian undercurrent in much of that country's cultural discussion and rejecting the idea that literature has been a force for positive social change. Reis analyzes 8 works of fiction written during what he calls the transition period between 1850 and 1950 when Brazil advanced from an agrarian society to an urban society. His map of the country's modernization reveals the role of intellectuals - often co-opted in construction of a strong, central state - and the aversion toward history that he says characterizes much of Brazilian social formation. Even Brazil's leftist literature parallels the history written by the dominant groups, he argues, and it perpetuates the unjust, closed, and elitist structure of the State. He sums up the concerns of the book by asserting, History must be taken as a problem. Organized around the mataphor of a pearl necklace, each chapter (or bead on the strand) addresses a specific feature of the authoritarian question. The writers discussed - those ignored by contemporary Brazilian criticism as well as those canonized - include Jose de Alencar, Humberto de Campos, Jose Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Galeao Coutinho, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Machado de Assis and Erico Verissimo are the two discussed here whose literary practice, as Randal Johnson observes in his Foreword, fractures the monolithic solidity of discursive certainty, linking them to later writers such as Oswald de Andrade, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, and Clarice Lispector.

Theory and Practice of Public Participation in Planning

Communications, sociology and social psychology, and political science provide the principal theoretical base for public participation programs. Planners more readily accept improved communications than the other disciplines as a starting point for public participation program development. Techniques used to involve the public include workshops, forums, familiarization tours, brochures, opinion surveys, pro and con sheets, participation scorecards, briefings, and modified public hearings. In general, the successes have been impressive and rather easy to obtain. Failures have not necessarily been permanent and do not necessarily cast doubt on the theoretical base. Primary contributions of communications theory are two-way communication, multistep flow, and multiple entry into the system. Contributions of sociology and social psychology are the notion that planning is a social process, the concept of perception, and the concepts of trust, legitimacy, and rapport. Political science contributes the categorization of political systems into democratic and elitist structures and orderliness and conformance with law and principle.