Emancipatory Discourse Research Articles

The End of Managerial Control?

This article has the aim of considering whether managerial control, no matter its form, has outlived, its usefulness in postbureaucratic society, and if so, whether it can be replaced by a more emancipatory discourse among local practitioners as they confront the immanent requirements of social interaction within their own practices. The article initially reviews the limitations of bureaucratic control and considers postbureaucratic or “soft” alternatives as sources of empowerment. Seen as ideals, postbureaucratic options are not thought to overturn the imposition of control in organizing, but the relocation of the positioning of work to the practice setting offers management a new role as the facilitator of the critical discourse required to sustain and enhance local activity.

Rethinking Heideggerian Marxism

Recent debates in philosophy and critical theory have focused on a renewed concern with the work of Martin Heidegger. Thus, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Fredric Jameson have all debated the nature of Heidegger's legacy, albeit with differing assessments of his continuing relevance for an emancipatory critical discourse. This essay begins by exploring the thesis that there are at least two possible appropriations of Heidegger's work. One is derived from the existentialist phenomenology of the early Heidegger and is exemplified by the recently published collection of Herbert Marcuse's essays entitled Heideggerian Marxism; the other foregrounds a “posthumanist” Heidegger and culminates in the “aleatory materialism” of the later, “post-Marxist” Louis Althusser. After examining the differentiated nature of Heidegger's philosophical legacy for Marxism, the essay focuses on the more “local” level of aesthetic theory in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which provides the basis for a “re-ontologization” of aesthetics, emphasizing the role of art as a “dynamic of human activity.”

Power, Resistance, and Women Politicians in Cambodia: Discourses of Emancipation. By Mona Lilja. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. 2008. 214 pp. $70.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. - Women and Politics in Thailand: Continuity and Change. Edited by Kazuki Iwanaga. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. 2008. 284 pp. $69.00 cloth, $29.00 paper.

Power, Resistance, and Women Politicians in Cambodia: Discourses of Emancipation. By Mona Lilja. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. 2008. 214 pp. $70.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. - Women and Politics in Thailand: Continuity and Change. Edited by Kazuki Iwanaga. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. 2008. 284 pp. $69.00 cloth, $29.00 paper.

Learning as lack: Individual learning in organizations as an empowering encounter with failed imaginary constructions of the self

The purpose of this article is to draw on psychoanalytic, particularly Lacanian, theorizing, to examine individual learning as an empowering encounter with fundamental lack. Specifically, I explore learning as an imaginary construction of the learner’s self that invariably fails thereby providing opportunities for the experience of empowerment and liberation. I discuss the implications this has for how we conceptualize and experience learning as an emancipatory discourse in organizations.

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology as Emancipatory Discourse in the Late Soviet Union

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

The Headscarf and Emancipation in the Netherlands

In this article, I draw on qualitative research on headscarf wearing among Dutch students of Turkish origin in Amsterdam. The aim was to give voice to Muslim girls and to critically revisit the emancipation discourse with regard to the headscarf issue in the Netherlands after the murder of the film director Theo van Gogh in 2004. My main argument is that the issue of the Muslim headscarf in the Dutch context – in which there is a growing tension between the Muslims and the non-Muslims1 – has been used to perpetuate prejudices and stereotypes about Muslim women and this issue, as a ‘cultural control’. These prejudices and stereotypes shape the discussions around headscarves in Holland, and can be seen strikingly in the views of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian refugee who is a former member of the Dutch Parliament and the author of the script of the sensationalist 2004 film Submission, and Cisca Dresselhuys, the ex-editor-in-chief of the leading Dutch feminist magazine Opzij. Both contend that the headscarf is a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression and that principles of Islam and women’s emancipation are incompatible (Dresselhuys, 2001; Hirsi Ali, 2006). They offer a single (universal) path for the emancipation of Muslim women through removing their headscarves. I hope that by capturing the voices of Muslim women on the sources of their ‘oppression’, this research article will make a contribution to feminist and liberation psychology that focus on the ‘causes of oppression laying in the structures and ideologies that create discrimination and prejudice as the manifestations of oppression’ (Martin-Baro, 1994 cited in Moane, 2003). This research argues that the forced removal of the headscarf is an imposition of ‘universal emancipation’ that further deepens social and cultural inequalities and causes these women’s further oppression rather than their emancipation.

Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late-Nineteenth-Century California Magazines

This essay analyzes the workings of romantic love and its legal institution, marriage, as signs of universal humanity in fictional representation of Chinese immigrant women in two important California magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Overland Monthly and the Land of Sunshine , including short stories written by Asian American/Eurasian writer Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. Reading these fictional narratives in the contexts of the period's prevailing trope of "yellow slavery," antimiscegenation legislation that codified white heteronormativity, and the magazines' expansionist rhetoric, I argue that these narratives constitute a "culture of benevolence"-sentimental emancipatory discourse shaped by U.S. women's reform movements-which has been integral to the racial projects of the U.S. nation and empire. By tracing the tension between the trope of "yellow slavery" and marriage, I situate my analysis within the broader shared ideological structure and connected histories that racialized African Americans and Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century all the while foregrounding how heteronormative narratives about Chinese immigrant labor produced the period's shifting boundaries between the domestic and the foreign. I argue that while sentimental narratives attempt to address injustices by "humanizing" the Chinese, that is, by imagining their inclusion in universal humanity through heteronormative love and marriage, the very terms of heteronormativity paradoxically rationalize the logic of exclusionary laws, obscure imperial historic power relations, and undermine the eligibility of the Chinese for citizenship, socially, culturally, and politically. These narratives thus expose the limits of emancipatory discourses that posit heteronormative love and marriage as the passages to full membership within U.S. capitalist and imperial relations.

Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (review)

Reviewed by: Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies James Cedric Woods (bio) Norma K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith , eds. Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. 2008. 624 pp. Cloth, $140.00. Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith work to create connections among indigenous epistemologies, theories of colonization and the postcolonial, emancipatory discourses, critical theory, and critical pedagogy through this collection of different perspectives, approaches, methodologies, and ethics involving research. The editors see this work as the opportunity to launch a new era of critical indigenous inquiry. With such a far reaching mission, they also have as their goal a work that can be used for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students. They have achieved their self-stated target of reaching both undergraduates and graduates with some chapters, although others should clearly be reserved for graduate students, who are better prepared to engage the theoretical frameworks or deconstruction of frameworks of thought, research, and ethics. As to their hope of launching a new era of critical indigenous inquiry, some chapters did make me rethink why and how I do research as an indigenous scholar (Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) and, equally important, what I could recommend to my own community to protect [End Page 228] our interest better. In particular, chapter 25 by Battiste, addressing the development of a research protocol for the Mi'kmaw Nation of Nova Scotia, was more than informative. It has inspired me to work on a similar protocol to propose to my own tribe. This contribution is clearly not about an abstract theory but about application and self-determination and should be read by First Nations scholars and communities who deal with outside researchers on an ongoing basis. If my self-reflection and call to action from reading the text is a gauge, some of the essays do have the power to inspire and motivate at least this indigenous scholar. Additionally, indigenous scholars provide perspectives from North America, New Zealand, Africa, and the Middle East about the why, how, and ethical responsibilities they assume when doing research. Further explorations occur later as to what the contributions of these scholars may have on Western science as a whole. In and of itself, this multiplicity of voices—from numerous indigenous perspectives (Native American, Hawaiian, Maori, African, and First Nations) as well as from feminist, gay, and critical race theorists, participatory action researchers, and others—makes this volume worth owning for any graduate student in the field of anthropology. Current scholars may find some surprises in the shifting terrain and the expectations indigenous and other communities have for researchers, some based on and reflected in the chapters of this book. These shifting and multivocal qualities get at the editors' introductory assertion that "we believe there is a great need for a dialogue between critical theorists and indigenous scholars and indigenous peoples" (x). This implies collaboration both across disciplines and the indigene-colonizer divide and with indigenous communities. The goal of collaboration among scholars is to "speak to oppressed, colonized persons living in postcolonial situations of injustice: women, women of color, Third World women, African American women, Black women, Chicano and Other minority group women, queer, lesbian, and transgendered, Aboriginal, First Nation, Native American, South African, Latin American, and Pacific and Asian Islander persons" (x). Moreover, "critical indigenist pedagogy . . . turns the academy and its classrooms into sacred spaces, where indigenous and nonindigenous scholars interact, share experiences, take risks, explore alternative methods of interpretation, and participate in a shared agenda" (12). This type of indigene-colonizer [End Page 229] collaboration is specifically addressed in chapter 23 by Jones and Jenkins. For collaboration to be ethical in relation to indigenous communities, Jones and Jenkins assert that research must accomplish the following: (1) benefit and promote self-determination for participants; (2) begin with the concerns of indigenous people, which are assessed in terms of benefits created for them; and (3) represent indigenous persons honestly and honor indigenous knowledge, customs, and rituals. Several chapters develop and utilize community-specific approaches and case studies of how these collaborative guidelines play out in the field (Bishop; Krog, Mpolweni-Zantsi, Ratele; Madison; Tomaselli, Dyll, and Francis). The editors do not assert...

Emancipatory Discourse and Liberation

This article takes up an important question that has puzzled learning theorists in the critical tradition, namely, are the dialogic practices of emancipatory discourse sufficient to change oppressive conditions in the power structure of the modern organization? In other words, can critical dialogic processes change the social order to close the gap between a privileged class of managers and workers, or do we require class struggle and structural reform? By elaborating on such methods as dialogue, public reflection and action science, this article attempts to make the case that marginalized groups in society might find their voice in projects that are intentionally contextualized and publicly reflective. These methods have found applications in some illustrated critical pedagogies, although not without strain induced from conventional institutions. The article concludes with an enumeration of some conditions under which emancipatory discourse and liberationist struggle may coincide.

(In)Visibilidade do género na sexualidade juvenil: propostas para uma nova concepção sobre a educação sexual e a prevenção de comportamentos sexuais de risco

Neste artigo pretendemos mostrar como o género é um conceito determinante e imprescindível quando se trabalham as questões da sexualidade juvenil, particularmente quando se aborda a sexualidade das jovens adolescentes. A literatura feminista tem alertado para a continuidade dos discursos de vitimização, de medo e de moralidade que continuam a servir, em muitos casos e em muitos países, para justificar conteúdos de programa de educação sexual nas escolas e de campanhas de prevenção de doenças sexualmente transmissíveis, essencialmente sobre o HIV. Contudo, depois de analisar esses discursos, nota-se claramente a ausência de um discurso emancipador sobre a sexualidade feminina adolescente. Apesar da epidemia do HIV e de o número crescente de mulheres heterossexuais (de todas as faixas etárias, das mais jovens às mais idosas) a serem infectadas implicar a necessidade de uma atenção redobrada, esse problema não pode justificar discursos reguladores e tradicionais da sexualidade feminina. São necessários novos discursos emancipadores e de empowerment das jovens adolescentes, de responsabilização de jovens do sexo masculino pelas questões da reprodução e da construção de um projecto igualitário e, ao mesmo tempo, de programas e de campanhas informadas pelo conhecimento existente relativamente às questões do género e à assimetria entre os sexos na vivência da sexualidade.

Contrasting discourses of emancipation and empowerment in selected albums by Hosiah Chipanga and Fungisai Zvakavapano

ABSTRACT The choice of the two contemporary gospel musicians, Hosiah Chipanga and Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave (hereafter referred to simply as Fungisai), emanates from a desire to critique the discourses of emancipation in gospel music from a sociological perspective in Zimbabwe's crippling context. The idea is to have some contrasting discourses from a male and female perspective and critique how the two musicians deal with the internally and externally induced challenges confronting the young nation of Zimbabwe. The two singers both hail from the eastern border town of Mutare. While Chipanga claims to be a Christian prophet, Fungisai's music has its basis in the scriptural passages from the Bible that singers are routinely using to make sense of the challenges facing Zimbabweans today. The article therefore seeks to reveal and critique how the two singers have risen to the challenge of inspiring and empowering their audiences to appropriate pragmatic strategies so that people may survive to salvage something of value from an already threatened existence. The prominence of the two musicians has also been heightened by their participation at the national all-inclusive music galas, such as the Independence and Heroes Splush galas, which have been held annually from about 2000 to commemorate and celebrate Zimbabwe's milestones. Significantly, the singers are gospel musicians who appear to be participating in secular ceremonies in an effort to raise their audiences’ consciousness about personal emancipation and empowerment, instead of just dwelling on spiritual salvation. Their music is designed to capture the defining moments in the unfolding sociopolitical life of the Zimbabwean nation. Because of their active involvement in and prominence at these national music shows, one may suggest that Hosiah Chipanga and Fungisai's music provides some critical interrogation of the social fabric of Zimbabwe's national and cultural formations.

The biblical jubilee: old wineskin for a new wine?

In the Biblical Old Testament a religious framework, Jubilee Law, provides a mandated procedure for dealing with the indebted Hebrew and his property. 1 Emerging from Mosaic Law, this framework is based on alternative perspectives of stewardship and societal economic relationships to the current domination of neo-liberalism in supranational organizations, in particular the international financial institutions. Themes and concepts emerging from Jubilee Law can offer the critical accounting literature a theological lens to critique accounting in the current global arena, especially the debt crisis of poor countries. A theological perspective, grounded in laws that protect the economically vulnerable, provides an alternative emancipatory discourse which has resonated with activist groups and others, and which challenges and critiques contemporary economic practices and offers an ethical framework for mandating social justice.

African Political Thought as an Epistemic Framework for Understanding African Media

The central thesis of this article is to apply the epistemic framework of African political thought to a postcolonial understanding of contemporary African media. It achieves this in two ways. First, it argues for a historical and conceptual correlation between African political thought and postcolonial theory in terms of the categories of democratic resistance and cultural identity. It concludes that postcolonial theory imbues African political thought with the theoretical and analytic vitality of an emancipatory discourse that can engage with contemporary questions of, inter alia, African media and global capitalism. Second, it demonstrates how African political thinking has influenced the structure and function of the media in Africa. It concludes that native resistance to colonialism and the subsequent construction of statehood formed dynamic sites of African mediation, and that the postcolonial tendency for self-determination underpins the dynamic of media localization in the neocolonial age of globalization.

Agency and Change: Re-evaluating Foucault's Legacy

Michel Foucault's work marks an important break with conventional ontological dualism, epistemological realism and rationalist and intentional notions of individual action and human agency. In these respects his ideas have had an enormous influence on postmodern organization theory and analysis, as well as related forms of social constructionism. In particular, Foucault's ideas have led to a rejection of agency-structure dichotomies and a move towards process-based ontologies of `organizing/changing', that create new problematics of agency as discourse, talk, text or conversation. While this ontological shift toward nominalism has often provoked a counter-reaction against the `death of the subject' and the corrosive influence of postmodernism, there have been few attempts to explore how Foucault's decentring of agency is related to new, more positive and potentially emancipatory discourses that redefine the relationship between agency and change, resistance and power in organizations and society. Here it will be argued that Foucault's legacy can be re-conceptualized as a theorization of the decentring of agency consisting of four key components: discourse, power/ knowledge, embodiment and self-reflexivity. Redefined within Foucauldian organizational discourses, decentred agency can lead to new possibilities for the exploration of agency as discourse and the broader dispersal of agency in organizations. It will be concluded, however, that Foucault's concept of agency fails as a theorization of change: it breaks the link between the voluntary choice or desire to `act otherwise' and the moral, political and practical possibilities of `making a difference'.

Between vision and reality: reassessing Jewish agricultural colony projects in nineteenth century America

This article reassesses the story of agricultural colonies established by Jews, for Jews, in the USA during the nineteenth century. Well established Jews developed schemes to settle recent Jewish immigrants on the soil. These schemes were characterized by unrealistic expectations, bad planning, and, when implemented, frequent failures. Yet, Jewish agricultural colonies must be distinguished from Christian, proto-Socialist or other utopian projects. The sponsors of Jewish colonies in the USA did not strive for separation from general society. Rather, they sought to assist Jewish integration through settlement on the land. The conceptual framework of Jewish productivization in America closely echoed the discourse of emancipation in Central Europe.

“THE DARKEST IS BEFORE THE BREAK OF DAY”

This article seeks to contribute to recent approaches within Early American Studies, which position the early USA within a hemispheric transnational framework, and which depart from exceptionalist perspectives that view the identity formation of the United States as predominantly a negotiation of intra-national differences and traditions. Proceeding from Malini Schueller and Edward Watts's concept of the “messy beginnings” of American identity, it explores the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution on the identity discourses within the young nation. The article argues that while the Caribbean's image as a site of slavery, social and racial unrest, and miscegenation made it a “sensitive spot” in white republican discourses after the American Revolution, early emancipatory African-American discourses disrupted the racial stereotyping of black people as barbarous and powerless by using the West Indian slave revolt to construct alternative and empowering versions of black identity. The essay investigates the strategies by which African-American authors such as Prince Hall and John Russwurm employ the Caribbean experience of black revolt to imagine an alternative collective history distinct from that of white America.

SIKHISM'S EMANCIPATORY DISCOURSES: Some critical perspectives

Against the backdrop of globalisation, and the attendant instability in the global economic order, coupled with an apparent upsurge in local, regional and international conflicts based on various kinds of group identification (race, ethnicity, religion etc), the promises of western progress, of modernity and civilisation are becoming increasing incredulous. The temporal and spatial distortions caused by globalisation, underpinned by economic, cultural and epistemological uncertainty, throw up a number of extremely difficult challenges for critical social theory. In response to this challenge, postmodern and postcolonial scholars have sought to problematise and prise apart the surface narrative of western modernity. These new spaces of intellectual inquiry offer scholars of Sikhism new and exiting opportunities to revisit our own understandings of Sikh theology and tradition. More specifically, it enables one to re-imagine and re-inscribe the emancipatory discourses that have historically been associated with Sikhism within the context of late or post-modernity. Against this backdrop the central aim of this paper is therefore to re-imagine and re-inscribe the emancipatory discourses that have been associated with Sikhism; discourses that have hitherto been very much rooted within a European enlightenment worldview. In order to provide both theoretical and historical coherence to the latter discussion, the first half of the paper will set out a detailed overview of development of ideas relating to ‘human emancipation’ within the context of modernity and post-modernity. From this broad philosophical background, given their centrality to contemporary debates about human emancipation, the second part will examine three key discursive categories, namely those of ‘race’, class/cast and gender. This will be done through a reflexive approach juxtaposing a review of contemporary sociological understandings of ‘race’, class/cast and gender and a critical reading of Sikh scriptures.

Sailing between narrations: voices that construct and undermine the credibility in the legal scope

Extracts from interviews with various members of the legal community, and with two ex-prisoners and their partners, are used to argue that judicial accounts of events can be understood as narratives that construct Justice as credible, impartial and objective, while silencing opposing accounts. This paper analyses the discourse of the legal community on the one hand, and, on the other, critical voices that offer a new emancipatory discourse of Justice.

Mobilising accounting in the radical media during the First World War and its aftermath: The case of Forward in the context of Red Clydeside

It remains the case that surprisingly little research has been done into the mobilising of accounting in media such as newspapers. Moreover, one can still argue that there is, again surprisingly, a paucity of research into accounting's emancipatory dimensions, actual as well as potential. And this is in spite of the scope for such work and the apparent significance of such topics for the critical social analysis of accounting. We seek here to add to and build upon the work that has been done in these areas [see, Gallhofer S, Haslam J. The aura of accounting in the context of a crisis: Germany and the First World War. Acc Organ Soc 1991; 16(5/6):487–520; Gallhofer S, Haslam J. Accounting/art and the emancipatory project: some reflections. Acc Audit Accountability J 1996;9(5):23–44; Gallhofer S, Haslam J. Accounting and emancipation: some critical interventions. London: Routledge; 2003; see also, for instance, Lehman C, Tinker T. The ‘real’ cultural significance of accounts. Acc Organ Soc 1987;12(5);503–22; Lehman C. Accounting's changing role in social conflict. New York: Markus Wiener; 1992; Beard V. Popular culture and professional identity: accountants in the movies. Acc Organ Soc 1994;19(3):304–18; Bougen P. Joking apart: the serious side to the accountant stereotype. Acc Organ Soc 1994;19(3):319–35; Broadbent J, Ciancanelli P, Gallhofer S, Haslam J. Enabling accounting: the way forward? Acc Audit Accountability J 1997;10(3):265–75; Lehman G, Tinker T. Environmental accounting: accounting as instrumental or emancipatory discourse. In: Proceedings of the interdisciplinary perspectives on accounting conference, July; 1997; Shearer T. Ethics and accountability: from the for-itself to the for-the-other. Acc Organ Soc 2002;27(6):541–73]. We elaborate a critical historical analysis of accounting's mobilisation in the radical media in the crisis context of the First World War and its aftermath. We focus upon the way in which accounting is mobilised in Forward, an important radical weekly newspaper of the key context of politically charged ‘Red Clydeside’ during this crisis period. Our general concern here is to further bring out and articulate the political character of accounting and its potential in the context of seeking to transform accounting and society. In our focus, we explore a number of ways in which accounting is mobilised to support a socialistic rhetoric that is disturbing for hegemonic forces. Our study contributes to an understanding of radical accounting functioning in the early twentieth century, adding to previous insights. We thus aim here to further encourage engaged action towards emancipatory development in and through accounting.

Book Review: From Left Communism to Post-Modernism: Reconsidering Emancipatory Discourse

Book Review: From Left Communism to Post-Modernism: Reconsidering Emancipatory Discourse