Form Of Social Action Research Articles

The "Economic" and the "Social": Autonomy of Spheres and Disciplinary Boundaries

Research agenda of the New Economic Sociology since its emergence in the 1970-1980s can be described as a «negative program», focused mainly on critique of economics. Nowadays many economic sociologists as well as sympathizing economists observe theoretical crisis of the negative program. Drawing on the works by M. Weber and K. Polanyi it is shown that fundamental drawbacks of the particular economic-sociological model of explanation arise from the widespread belief of economic sociologists that economic action is a form of social action. The author argues that the problematic relation between «economic» and «social» shouldnt serve for drawing aprioristic disciplinary boundaries between economics and economic sociology. Instead the suggestion is put forward to make this relation the subject of economic-sociological study and indicate some fresh and important theoretical tools for such an agenda.

Advertising eugenics: Charles M. Goethe's campaign to improve the race

Over the last several decades historians have shown that the eugenics movement appealed to an extraordinarily wide constituency. Far from being the brainchild of the members of any one particular political ideology, eugenics made sense to a diverse range of Americans and was promoted by professionals ranging from geneticists and physicians to politicians and economists.(1) Seduced by promises of permanent fixes to national problems, and attracted to the idea of a scientifically legitimate form of social activism, eugenics quickly grew in popularity during the first decades of the twentieth century. Charles M. Goethe, the land developer, entrepreneur, conservationist and skilled advertiser who founded the Eugenics Society of Northern California, exemplifies the broad appeal of the eugenics movement. Goethe played an active role within the American eugenics movement at its peak in the 1920s. The last president of the Eugenics Research Association,(2) he also campaigned hard against Mexican immigration to the US and he continued open support for the Nazi regime's eugenic practices into the later 1930s.(3) This article examines Goethe's eugenic vision and, drawing on his correspondence with the leading geneticist Charles Davenport, explores the relationship between academic and non-academic advocates of eugenics in America.

Resisting the mystification of narrative inquiry: unmasking the real conflict between story analysts and storytellers

other spoken or unspoken activity. I therefore remain opposed in principle to what might be called narrative exceptionalism, preferring to see any and every form of action given equally rigorous scrutiny by social scientists. I do not, therefore, think that – pace several influential commentators – narrative is an especially distinctive form of human or social behaviour. I also remain opposed to various forms of reductionism. Too often ‘narrative’ is a way of investing the individual speaking subject with a significance that is profoundly unsociological. Let me make myself doubly clear. My argument is not one levelled against narrative per se. I cannot indeed imagine how one could be ‘for’ or ‘against’ narrative, or any other form of social action. My argument is, however, strongly in favour of treating narrative like any and every form of activity, and therefore to analyse narratives in precisely the same way that one might address any other. I am by no means alone in promoting this view, of course, and these issues of method are by no means confined to the treatment of illness narratives. They represent but a special case of the widespread tendency to treat any and all ‘narratives’ as special, and to reproduce them appreciatively rather than analyse them formally (cf. Atkinson and Delamont 2006). This in turn reflects more problematic tendencies in ‘qualitative research’ – but that is a debate that must continue elsewhere.

A Century of Essential Feminism

In the course of reflecting on her own experience as a woman in the professional world, the author identifies 2 lines of development in the feminist movement. One is the increasing demand for women's political and economic power. The other is the search for an autonomous self, one that is independent of the power of men in patriarchal societies. The relative successes and failures over time, culture, social class, and geography are discussed, and some form of social action is suggested for American feminism at the present time.

Luigi Nono's Canti di vita e d'amore: Musical Dialectics and the Opposition of Present and Future

Luigi Nono's Canti di vita e d'amore represents a moment of stylistic shift in the composer's output, and also a change in his political commitments. As Nono's political commitments shifted from a kind of Left idealism to more immediate forms of social activism, so his composition turned from abstract integral serialism to more immediately perceptible constructive strategies. Canti di vita e d'amore not only exhibits these new developments in compositional technique, but also deploys those techniques to support the work's long-range narrative of emergence from present-day crisis into a future of light and hope.

Evaluating the Impact of Human Rights Litigation on Policy and Practice: A Case Study of the UK

This article examines the methodological challenges in evaluating whether, and how, human rights litigation has an impact in the world outside the courtroom. Drawing on research carried out for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in Britain on the impact of selected human rights legal cases on the delivery of public services, it argues that assessing impact requires us to cast the net wide. Impact may be evident in legal judgments and the generalizable principles they enshrine. Impact may be seen in resulting changes to public policy and its implementation - including the process by which decisions are made. It may also be evident in outcomes in the form of both empirical social realities and the experience of people delivering and using the services that are implicated in the judgment. The article further argues that understanding the mechanisms by which legal judgments are (or are not) translated into changes in policy and practice enables the human rights practitioner to identify barriers to impact and make recommendations that go beyond individual cases to the very process of translating law into the realization of rights. The article situates this analysis in the context of work in other national contexts to use litigation instrumentally alongside other forms of social action to pursue human rights goals – and wider academic debates about the risk of creating an artificial disconnection between law and political action in the promotion of human rights.

Working the Hybridization: A Case of Bi- and Multilingual Speakers in Japan

This report is part of a larger, 2-year ethnography of bi- and multilingual speakers in Japan. On the basis of audio and videotape recordings of discussions among international students in a Japanese university, this study examines participants' deployment of different conversational resources to understand and talk about marginalizing experiences. The first part of the article highlights the verbal and nonverbal conduct involved in speakers' attempts to orient themselves and their interlocutors to societal contexts that are not always receptive to outsiders from different cultural groups. Through a nexus analysis framework, the second part of the article explains how the interlocutors' local speech behavior is a form of social action embedded in larger discourses concerning foreigners. The closing sections feature a discussion of how a cross-disciplinary synthesis of micro- and macro-analyses not only provides a more complete picture of the situation under investigation but also constitutes a more holistic and socially responsive methodological approach.

Islam and the New Political Landscape

In this article we consider the forms of democratic participation that revolve around issues of religious faith and Islam. The context of such work is one in which a concern with the levels of participation in the political institutions of Western Europe and North America feature prominently in both journalistic and academic debate. The article speaks to debates that are concerned with the efficacy of specific forms of participation. In doing so we argue that we need to think carefully about the forms of social action that constitute participation in the democratic process. We also need to think precisely about definitions of the political with which people engage. If we take the political as a domain in which the ethical settlement of society is contestable, the sorts of mobilization around faith communities that this article describes are clearly a form of political participation. Yet the article argues that the reasons many become involved in these forms of social organization in contemporary East London is precisely because they are seen as less complicit with mainstream political institutions of the British state.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's Afterimage

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's Afterimage

Dalla referenza alla relazione: analisi interlocutoria di un uso competitivo della parola scambiata

- The paper begins from the consideration that the speech is a form of social action. The present study aims at showing as in all conversations is impossible to separate cognitive-representational aspects from social-relational aspects of the speech, because the relationship is very important to get into communication with people. In specific contexts, full of symbolic aspects, relational aspects are the basis of the contract communication, and represent the real ‘stake in game'. In a situation of political discussion, enlarged by the television mediation, the interaction is strategically oriented to persuasive and competitive purposed. In this study, the method of Conversations Analysis shows the most frequent strategies of the speech competitive use. In particular, the most frequent strategy consist of attacking the preparatory conditions and the sincerity conditions of speech acts accomplished by interlocutor, to attack his face and so to attack him as a person.

Contradiction as Agency: Self-Determination, Transcendence, and Counter-Imagination in Third Wave Feminism

This essay examines the contradictions often found in third wave feminist texts that function as strategic choices that may shape, foster, and enhance an individual's sense of agency. Many third wave feminists utilize contradiction as a way to understand emergent identities, to develop new ways of thinking, and to imagine new forms of social action. Agency, then, stems from the use of contradiction as a means of self-determination and identity, of transcendence of seemingly forced or dichotomous choices, and counter-imaginations of a better future.

Global Justice as Ethico-Political Labor and the Enactment of Critical Cosmopolitanism

This essay links global justice to a materialist theorization of an alternative globalization in order to decenter the formalist current predominating in contemporary human rights discourses. It does so through the concept of the work of global justice: namely, the ethico-political labor and forms of social action that are constitutive of transnational struggles for emancipation. Using this framework, the essay proposes a way out of the human rights blackmail in which radical thinking is mired, by arguing in favor of a politically deontologizing and social constructivist vision of global justice. The latter serves to outline the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of a critical cosmopolitanism grounded in structural transformations of the existing world order.

1968: THE AMERICAN AND SCANDINAVIAN EXPERIENCES

This article compares and contrasts 1968 and many of the themes and events the late 1960s in the United States with those in Scandinavia. Along the way it examines similarities and differences in motivations, culture, ideology and politics that resulted in some similar and many different forms of social activism.

Schizophrenia as social discourse: How do people use their diagnosis for social action?

‘Schizophrenia’ can do things other than diagnose or stigmatize those so defined in that it can serve various forms of social action. Two hundred and fifty-eight randomly selected patients with an experience of schizophrenia and their relatives participated in the study of schizophrenia as social discourse. They used the diagnosis for political struggle and social leverage in such diverse forms as demonstration of the meaning of ‘a schizophrenic’, discursive intervention for ideological invitation, reclaiming personal worth (revalorization), solidarity with fellow patients and economic compensation. Despite the inherent value of the diagnosis in helping them get the right treatment, participants saw devaluing meaning in various designations for schizophrenia and, given choice, preferred certain formulations of the diagnosis over others in relation to their social discourse. To be effective, treatment models, service delivery and communication with patients must allow, interpret and incorporate their first person accounts (discourse) as a feature of their individuality and uniqueness in the therapeutic process. This is likely to increase their sense of wellbeing, empowerment and cooperation with the treatment.

Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita: Re-writing as Ethics

This article purports to show how The Rape of Sita re-writes the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, which is recontextualised in contemporary Mauritian time and space in order to make a subversive political comment on Western patriarchal society. Through the posing of ethical questions, language becomes a form of social action, a re-signifying practice, which calls for change by generating another story.

Social action in Nigerian English language poetry: A linguistic change in poetic discourse

It is important to note that language plays an essential role in the production of poetry. This is even more so in Nigeria where the art of poetry is mostly practiced in the English Language, a language that is the arrowhead of our colonial heritage. This is why the changes or variations in usage of this language have become a reflection of the people's temperament from the colonial times to the present. This paper looks at the use of English in Nigerian poetry from 1950 to the present with the aim of underscoring the linguistic changes in poetic discourse as a form of social action. Sophia: An African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 8(1) 2005: 136-141 Keywords: Keywords:

Towards an Archaeological-Realist Foucauldian Analytics of Government

Studies of government that build upon the work of French thinker Michel Foucault have become very influential for criminological and sociological research and theorizing. However, because Foucault 's archaeological texts—those prior to 1975— have, in large part, been neglected, many currents within his work that can be used to reformulate, strengthen and extend the analytic of government for the production of criminological knowledge have been left unexplored. This paper attends to the concep tion of indirect rule elaborated on in Foucault 's archaeological texts and to how the ontological posi tion elaborated there is sympathetic to realist metatheory. The paper advances a post-empiricist and realist informed analytic of government that holds government to be a stratified process concerning more than the empirically apprehendable outcomes of management techniques, forms of social action and expertise, indirect mechanisms of rule, sociopolitical objectives, and the proximity of authori ties from regulatory objects. In retrieving the neglected archaeological Foucault and illustrating the realist currents within his work, the paper provides some 'theoretical preconditions' and 'metathe oretical coherence' for future investigations of the institutions, practices, processes and objects of social ordering and rule that criminologists and sociologists routinely engage with.

The first Asian Lesbian Film and Video Festival in Taipei celebrates a new form of social activism

The first Asian Lesbian Film and Video Festival, held in Taipei in August 2005, brought forth media art, social activism and cultural exchange on one occasion. It provided a rare opportunity to showcase the experience of Asian lesbians, which is vastly different from the experience of those in Western countries. While there were great similarities in their love experiences among the 36 Asian lesbian shorts selected, they also reflected the differences among the Asian countries in terms of local development of tongzhi culture and community as well as the visibility of tongzhis. Among the Chinese communities, Taiwan was seen to be at the forefront of the development of tongzhi culture, Mainland China was new to the movement, and Hong Kong was somewhere in‐between. Japanese and Korean videos took a critical and reflective attitude towards social regulations and mainstream thoughts, although witty and farcical at times. While the Filipinos show a more tolerant attitude to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community, the major oppressive forces on lesbians were poverty, gender inequality and sexual violence. Only one Israeli documentary was shown at the film festival, which focused on lesbians living in the Jewish Orthodox traditions. The film won international acclaim and attracted much public attention to the issue. Films and videos were found to be an effective means to transcend language barriers and cultural differences for a true cross‐cultural exchange among Asian lesbians. During the few days of festival, a ‘queer nation’, not defined by nationalities or languages, but by the pursuit of love expressions, was constructed around The Taipei House.

New ethnicities online: reflexive racialisation and the internet.

In this article we analyse the emergence of Internet activity addressing the experiences of young people in two British communities: South Asian and Chinese. We focus on two web sites: http://www.barficulture.com and http://www.britishbornchinese.org.uk, drawing on interviews with site editors, content analysis of the discussion forums, and E‐mail exchanges with site users.Our analysis of these two web sites shows how collective identities still matter, being redefined rather than erased by online interaction. We understand the site content through the notion of reflexive racialisation. We use this term to modify the stress given to individualisation in accounts of reflexive modernisation. In addition we question the allocation of racialised meaning from above implied by the concept of racialisation. Internet discussion forums can act as witnesses to social inequalities and through sharing experiences of racism and marginalisation, an oppositional social perspective may develop.The online exchanges have had offline consequences: social gatherings, charitable donations and campaigns against adverse media representations. These web sites have begun to change the terms of engagement between these ethnic groups and the wider society, and they have considerable potential to develop new forms of social action.

Entering the Oppressor’s Mind: A Strategy of Writing in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent

In this article, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974), Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent (2003) are read as examples of texts in which women writers explore from within the minds and motives of fellow-African, male figures who perpetrate crimes and cruelties against women in their respective postcolonial societies. It is argued that, by doing so, these authors employ a strategy of both acknowledging (“owning”) and analysing the evils against which they simultaneously protest by their vivid portrayal of the harm done to women or girls by such men. Writing of this kind is seen as a form of social action through the authors’ employment of “illocutionary force” (Maria Pia Lara’s phrase). Following the introduction, the individual social setting and the texture of writing in each text is analysed in turn, while correspondences with the other two novels are briefly noted in the conclusion.