Hierarchical Power Relations Research Articles

The ethics of multiple authorship: power, performativity and the gift economy

The allocation of authorship credit in academic publication raises complex ethical issues but is comparatively under-researched, particularly in the social sciences. The paper analyses the results of research into attitudes to multiple authorship based on a survey questionnaire of academics working in education faculties in universities in Hong Kong. The results illustrate the way in which intellectual contribution is often overridden by considerations related to hierarchical power relations, notably in relation to research project leadership and doctoral supervision. These considerations normalize a gift economy. Belief in the legitimacy of power ordering and gift ordering of academic contributions to multiple authored publications indicate the need for research universities to pay more regard to institutional policies on scholarly authorship.

Doing and undoing risk: the mutual constitution of risk and heteronormativity in contemporary society

This paper develops the concepts of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ risk, a new approach to risk research that echoes the ‘doing gender’ of gender studies. In this way, we combine intersectional and risk theory and apply the new perspective to empirical material. To better explore the doing and undoing, or the performance, of risk, we will refer to practices that simultaneously (re)produce and hide socio-political norms and positions, played out in contemporary, hierarchical relations of power and knowledge. The aim is to develop a theoretical understanding of doing and undoing risk. The study makes use of transcripts from five focus group interviews with men and women, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of different ages living in Sweden to develop a theory of ‘doing risk’. The doing of risk of our informants takes place within the frame of a hegemonic heteronormativity. The way that risks are perceived and done in everyday life therefore always needs to be read within a frame of prevailing structures of power. This counts for all of us as we are all part of the hegemonic power structures and thereby are both subject to the intersecting doings of risk and performatively reproducing these power structures in practice.

’n Alternatiewe beskouing van die natuur se andersheid in E. Kotze se kortverhaal ‘Halfkrone vir die Nagmaal’

An alternative view of nature’s otherness in E. Kotze’s short story ‘Halfkrone vir die Nagmaal’ Diepsee: ’n Keur uit die verhale van E. Kotze (2014) refocuses our attention on Kotze’s short story collections which immortalised the sea and the littoral spaces of the West Coast in Afrikaans literature. This study comprises an ecocriticial investigation of the title story in Halfkrone vir die Nagmaal (1982), with attention to the manner in which distancing takes place from the conventional Western way of thinking by which is presumed that human-nature differences may serve to vindicate human domination of, or misconstrue the relationship with, the natural world. Differences between human and nonhuman nature in this narrative is integrated with details which clearly bring the human-nature relationship to light, as well as ideas of connectedness with nature. This leads me to an exploration of the representation of the sea and the natural sea environment as a literary demonstration of an alternative view of nature as the Other. The investigation centres on the discovery of characteristics of anotherness—characteristics in contrast to those of the Other in the dualistic human-nature view in which the key concepts of alienation and objectification still function to defend Western hierarchical power relationships. The alternative model of otherness, with anotherness as key concept, has its origins in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory concerning the term “relational otherness”. This model has been applied to the field of ecocriticism by Patrick Murphy who describes anotherness as a perception of otherness that respects difference without using it to justify domination or prohibit connection. Murphy emphasises that anotherness proceeds from a heterarchichal—that is, a non-hierarchical—sense of difference. The application of this alternative model of otherness, in the ecocritical context, to “Halfkrone vir die Nagmaal” leads to the discovery of a respectful approach to human-nature differences, where principles of domination or distancing do not apply, but rather those of relations and human-nature interaction. In voicing another nature, Kotze’s acts as “I-for-another” (Bakhtin’s expression) for the earth; her narrative becomes an act of responsibility towards a coastal strip that nowhere else in Afrikaans literature is captured so expansively and poignantly as in her work.

Coming to Castile with Cortés: Indigenous “Servitude” in the Sixteenth Century

“Coming to Castile with Cortés: Indigenous ‘Servitude’ in the Sixteenth Century” examines the circumstances of three indigenous criados (servants)—Pedro, Juan, and Francisco Manuel—with direct or indirect ties of patronage to the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés. As nonelite indios (Indians) displaced from Mexico to Castile, they experienced the transition from freedom to bondage in unique ways. Because the New Laws (1542) stated that, in principle, indios could be free in Spanish territories, all three initiated lawsuits before the tribunals of the House of Trade or the Council of the Indies. The trial depositions reveal the circumscribed life narratives of free indios whom others saw as slaves and whose lives were entwined with others more powerful than they. Each life story emphasizes the importance of hierarchical relations of power among masters, slaves, and servants, writ large in sixteenth-century Castile.

"Politics of Defiance": Uncovering the Causes and Consequences of Lynching and Communal Violence

When acts of lynching were first seared into the consciousness of the nation, Ida B. Wells-Barnett recognized them as attacks not only against individuals but also against the “peoplehood” of African Americans. The dehumanizing nature of mob violence enabled white majorities to rationalize laws and norms that effectively denied blacks the full rights of citizenship. Ironically, for much of the twentieth century scholars attempted to comprehend lynching through the actions of perpetrators rather than through the perspective of victims. Historians attributed lynching to lax attitudes toward law, the cult of southern honor, the need to reaffirm traditional hierarchical power relationships, and white-black psychosexual tensions channeled into ritualized killings that helped preserve the economic and social preeminence of southern white males. A discernible shift in focus, however, was evident at Emory University’s 2002 conference, “Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies,” which featured the insights of over ninety scholars and was held in conjunction with an explicit photographic exhibit that literally put the horrific effects of lynching at the center of academic consciousness. Michael J. Pfeifer’s superlative survey of recent scholarship on lynching suggests that a synthesis may now be emerging that could reconcile earlier work focused on the motivations of white perpetrators with newer insights that consider the perspective of minority victims and the impact that lynching had on communities.1 By broadening the spatial and temporal dimensions of lynching research, scholars have been able to move beyond seemingly intractable debates about the causes of communal violence. The highly contested relationship between the nature of southern law enforcement and lynching, for instance, has been resolved through Pfeifer’s consideration of lynching in a larger national context. In Rough Justice he contends that lynching resulted from a cultural war pitting rural and working-class advocates of “rough justice” against middle-class supporters of “due process.” Hence, lynching resulted not so much from ineffectual systems of law enforcement as from many rural whites’ deeply ambivalent feelings about the law and its ability to constrain the social aspirations of blacks. This conflict

‘Leader, you first’: The everyday production of hierarchical space in a Chinese bureaucracy

Recent studies highlight how organizational power relations are materialized in space. However, relatively little is known about how these spatialized power relations are reproduced on a day-to-day basis. Drawing on a ten-month ethnographic study of a large government office in China, we find that hierarchical space is produced through three intertwined processes. It proliferates as employees actively seek out signs of hierarchy in the organization’s space; it becomes familiarized as employees fabricate and circulate fanciful narratives about their spatial environs; and it is ritualized by employees acting out hierarchical relations across the organization’s space. These processes resulted in a hardening of the hierarchical relations of power. The study extends the existing literature by showing how hierarchical organizational space is not just something that is imposed on employees; it is also imposed by the employees themselves.

Linguistic rights and language policy: A south–north dialogue

Abstract A central thought, even a guiding principle, in Neville Alexander's work is the affirmation of the right to communicate and learn through one's own home language. In his writings, he embraced language policies that firmly reject all forms of racialisation and ethnicisation. For him, the imposition of one (national) language, along with the fragmentation of society into bounded and ethnicised linguistic groups, can be considered an expression of hierarchical power relations. This article explores Alexander's proposals on inclusive language policies that have resonated in Europe, not only in the scientific community but also with policymakers. Today, in many countries the emphasis on a single national language risks the exclusion of large segments of the population. The focus is here on how linguistic categorisations arising out of language ideologies can determine language policies and, more particularly, language-in-education policies. In highlighting Alexander's conviction that the role of socio...

A Lesson Study Approach to Improving a Biology Lesson

Lesson Study is a collaborative, cyclical and continuing professional development process, aiming at improving a lesson through critical reflection. This research is based on three cycles of Lesson Study conducted during a four-week workshop in Japan for 10 South African mathematics and science educators. A sub-group developed and refined a high school biology lesson on the blood circulatory system. The final goal of the process was to present the improved lesson in a real biology classroom in a Japanese high school. Two questions are explored in this research, ‘As the Lesson Study cycles are repeated, how does the focus of the discussion change and to what extent does the quality of reflection in terms of insight and substance increase?’, and ‘In what way, if at all, does the discussion contribute to the improvement of the lesson?’ In this research, we analysed the transcripts of three post-lesson discussions, one for each cycle of Lesson Study. The results indicate that both the focus of discussion and the quality of reflection changed depending on social context, hierarchical power relations among participants, and the perceived purpose of the session. Moreover, they show how certain comments contributed directly to improvements to the lesson. The results are discussed in the light of the theoretical conceptualisation of reflection used to analyse the data. We make some practical proposals as to how to enhance educators' participation in team lesson planning and improvement.

Accounting and power in religious institutions: Verona’s Santa Maria della Scala monastery in the Middle Ages

The relation between accounting and power in religious institutions has received little attention from accounting historians. The present article therefore studies the case of the Santa Maria della Scala monastery in Verona (Italy) during the Middle Ages to explore whether and how accounting might support the domination structure and facilitate power relations within the organisation. A documentary analysis of primary and secondary sources confirms that accounting played a key role in reinforcing both hierarchical and horizontal power relations among friars.

Governance, Representation and International Aid

The growth of the postwar 20th century international aid architecture has generated much debate over the successes and failures of aid, its changing forms and its challenges. This article uses this aid landscape to explore the representational or discursive power and authority of the aid donor over the aid recipient. It suggests that representations about what aid does, its modalities and dispensations reproduce a hegemonic discourse and that representational authority in diagnosing aid’s problems and prescribing solutions resides generally on one side of the aid binary. It thus focuses on the hierarchical or asymmetric relations of power implied by such a binary, on the way development aid in particular has come to shape self-understandings of donors in relation to recipients, and on the discursive labour that enables such a construction. It also explores how the post-Washington consensus on poverty eradication has embedded neoliberal solutions to development. The reproduction of the hegemonic aid discourse is examined in reference to NGOs involved in the dispensing of aid in Southeast Asia by drawing on scholarly literature and field research in Southeast Asia and Washington DC.

Racial appropriation in white expatriate South African discourses: Reading race on social club websites

This essay explores racial appropriation in white expatriate South African discursive practices in the early 2000s. Through an examination of expatriate South African social club websites, the author highlights the use of images and language that ground these appropriational rhetorics. Ultimately, he asserts that these appropriational rhetorics obscure whiteness, are reflective of hierarchical relations of power and privilege, and perpetuate traditional and racist ideologies. The author concludes by proposing several possible explanations for and implications of these discursive practices of appropriation.

CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE. Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies.

Catherine Clarke’s recent book is organized as a series of ‘discrete case studies which can each stand alone’ (p. 7), linked by their discussions of textual representations of hierarchical power relations, which reveal a ‘fundamental inter-play between hierarchy and economy’ (p. 1). The contribution the book aims to make, then, is to identify just how that ‘inter-play’ works out in specific cases and examples, in an effort to at least begin tracing the ground upon which hierarchical and economic or exchange-based concerns exemplify interactions of power in late Anglo-Saxon texts. The first chapter, ‘Order and Interlace: the Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book’, begins to address the issue of interplay by suggesting that the ‘-lac’ element of Guthlac’s name invokes such play, though the chapter’s focus on ‘interlace’ sometimes seems to come close to urging readers to also link the ‘-lac’ of Guthlac with the French-derived ‘lace’. In describing the two Guthlac poems’ depictions of hierarchical relationship (among Bartholomew, Guthlac, Beccel, devils, and so forth), as well as the bonds of personal friendship and affinity expressed and experienced by the characters, Clarke argues for understanding an interaction, interdependence, and (hence) interplay and interlace between hierarchical power and the more personal, affective bonds gathered under the umbrella term of ‘patronage’. In this, the opening chapter of the book, I would have liked to see a clearer account of what is meant by ‘power’ here, and I worried that the chapter relied too heavily on ‘interlace’ as a defining metaphor that drove the analysis more than sprung from it.

The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life

People create profiles on social network sites and Twitter accounts against the background of an audience. This paper argues that closely examining content created by others and looking at one’s own content through other people’s eyes, a common part of social media use, should be framed as social surveillance. While social surveillance is distinguished from traditional surveillance along three axes (power, hierarchy, and reciprocity), its effects and behavior modification is common to traditional surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of United States populations, I look at social surveillance, how it is practiced, and its impact on people who engage in it. I use Foucault’s concept of capillaries of power to demonstrate that social surveillance assumes the power differentials evident in everyday interactions rather than the hierarchical power relationships assumed in much of the surveillance literature. Social media involves a collapse of social contexts and social roles, complicating boundary work but facilitating social surveillance. Individuals strategically reveal, disclose and conceal personal information to create connections with others and tend social boundaries. These processes are normal parts of day-to-day life in communities that are highly connected through social media.

Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927–1962

Drawing on approaches from sound studies, this essay explores a historical role of a sound technology, telephony, in assessing desirable people, especially ideal and sanctioned consumers, as conveyed by seven short instructional films from the 1920s to the 1960s. After examining how telephony is represented visually and aurally, I argue that the essence of telephony’s sonic experience—intimate intersubjectivity—is largely missing from these depictions. These depictions contribute to constitutive discourses of telephone usership; they help define a proper or sound telephone user and ideal telephonic practices. Yet such discourses are also entangled with other flows of social meaning-making and power relations. In mapping the contours of good and bad users, telephone training films harness social stereotypes pertaining to gender, age, and race, imbuing seemingly neutral technological practices with hierarchical power relations of different social categories. This suggests what might be the specific threat from intersubjectivity: empathy. I conclude with a methodological postscript.

The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism (review)

MEJIAS-LOPEZ, ALEJANDRO. The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2009. 248 pp.Drawing from abundant research, especially in the archives, The Inverted Conquest describes and interrogates how Spanish American modernismo became a literary phenomenon swept through artistic and intellectual circles in Spain to establish itself by 1900 as the first literary current from Europe's former American colonies to assert its dominance in the metropolis. Modernismo has been consecrated as such, to the extent it has become commonplace, with respect to prosody in the Spanish-speaking world, to speak of a before and after Ruben Dario, the phenomenon's most acclaimed figure. With Dario visibly at the lead, the modernistas revolutionized Spanish poetic meter and shook the former metropolis's literary world with the currency of their knowledge of European (mostly French) cultural objects and literary and artistic tendencies; their taste for cosmopolitan travel, lifestyles, and poses; the unabashed eroticism of some of their works for the times; and their obvious delight in art for art's sake. Given the consensus on modernismo^ impact in Spanish and Spanish American letters, why might it now be worthwhile to return to the heat of the debate about this literary phenomenon, when its influence was beginning to demand attention in literary and intellectual circles in Spain?For a start, Alejandro Mejias-Lopez's detailed account of this impact and the controversies its poets and writers ignited suggests despite modernismos canonical status there remains unfinished business for its literary historians and critics: namely, the need to counter the persistent othering of modernismo in European, Anglo-American, and even some Spanish American theorizations of modernisms and modernity. Professor Mejias-Lopez goes so far as to claim the marginalization oi modernismo appears to be a precondition for such theorizations in order to establish that indeed modernismo is not modernism (2). In light of burgeoning research over the last fifteen years takes the Atlantic world as an analytical framework and the turn in European and US modernist studies over the last decade toward examining the field in a global context, Mejias-Lopez does well to take advantage of these paradigm shifts in several disciplines to situate the modernistas. Instead of rigidly hierarchical structures and relations of power, the new transatlanticism affords concepts amenable to poststructural and postcolonial theorizations, such as circuits, ebbs and flows, traces, displacements, and deterritorializations. Hence, through frequent though mindful culling of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of literary field, literary revolution, and symbolic capital, The Inverted Conquest elucidates complex networks of transatlantic correspondence, readership, and critical practices, and renews the way in which modernista challenges to the authority of the Spanish literary field might be articulated. But the book's conquest motif does not end here.Mejias-Lopez's study consistently tackles what he terms Europe's of modernity, is, the common supposition this continent had enjoyed homogeneous, evenly distributed, and equally powerful processes of modernization during the nineteenth century. Exploring the relationship between this myth and the marginalization of Spanish American modernismo, the book analyzes latenineteenth- century notions of modernization on both sides of the Atlantic by juxtaposing, in one among several convincing examples, Latin America's early adoption of republicanism and, with the exception of France, Europe's enduring monarchies. Furthermore, Mejias-Lopez's focus on the uniqueness of Spain's geopolitical and socioeconomic situation - one subject to economic and artistic challenges from some of its former colonies and to marginalization from its European neighbors to the north - not only helps to debunk myths of modernity on both sides of the Atlantic but also complicates both Eurocentric and postcolonial critical approaches to modernismo. …

Lay Observers, Telegraph Lines, and Kansas Weather: The Field Network as a Mode of Knowledge Production

ArgumentThis paper examines the field network – linking together lay observers in geographically distributed locations with a central figure who aggregated their locally produced observations into more general, regional knowledge – as a historically emergent mode of knowledge production. After discussing the significance of weather knowledge as a vital domain in which field networks have operated, it describes and analyzes how a more robust and systematized weather observing field network became established and maintained on the ground in the early twentieth century. This case study, which examines two Kansas City-based local observer networks supervised by the same U.S. Weather Bureau office, demonstrates some of the key issues involved in maintaining field networks, such as the role of communications infrastructure, especially the telegraph, the procedures designed to make local observation more systematic and uniform, and the centralized, hierarchical power relations that underpinned even a low-status example of knowledge production on the periphery.

Sex, grades and power in higher education in Ghana and Tanzania

Quantitative increases tell a partial story about the quality of women's participation in higher education. Women students' reporting of sexual harassment has been noteworthy in a recent study that I directed on widening participation in higher education in Ghana and Tanzania. The hierarchical and gendered power relations within universities have naturalised a sexual contract in which some male academics consider it a right to demand sex with female students in return for grades. These practices of transactional sex involve spatial and cognitive injustice as they contribute to social pressures for women reflexively to minimise their visibility and academic performance. The construction of female sexuality as a commodity and an object of barter also produces negative female learner identities. If women fail, this is evidence of lack of academic abilities and preparedness for higher education. If they achieve, this is attributed to women's ‘favoured’ position in gendered academic markets.

Gender Digital Divide

This article presents a case of the gender digital divide in the use of mobile phones in a small community of Latino immigrant farm workers in Southeast Ohio in the US. Contrary to the findings of previous studies that rural women around the world are using information and communication technologies (ICTs) for empowerment, this research reveals that immigration status interacts with gender and class identities such that Latina immigrant women who work in horticulture nurseries face limits of access, use, and distribution of knowledge for their own purposes and needs. The findings suggest that mobile phones are not inherently empowering to women, and under specific circumstances such as undocumented migration, they can serve as a device that strengthens hierarchical power relations between women and men.

The challenge of contributing to policy making in primary care: the gendered experiences and strategies of nurses

This paper explores nurses' experiences as members of primary care organisations set up to develop and commission health services for local communities. Nurses, alongside GPs and other health professionals, were given a place on the governing bodies (boards) of Local Health Groups - a move widely welcomed by the nursing profession as long overdue recognition of the important contribution nurses and nursing could bring to the policy arena. Nurse board members faced a number of challenges in their attempts to contribute to and influence local health policy. This ethnographic study (which involved non-participant observation of 33 board meetings and interviews with 29 board members including nurses) suggests that medical authority and control, and hierarchical power relations between doctors and nurses on the board, were seen by nurses as significant obstacles to their participation in this new policy arena. In response to their perceived lack of power and subordinate status, nurses employed a number of strategies to negotiate their participation as board members - these included 'getting it right', 'achieving the right balance', 'self-presentation' and 'unassertiveness'. These strategies reflected and reproduced gendered identities and relations of power and raise important questions regarding the influence of nurses and nursing within policy making.

Making a Pig of the Humanities: Re-centering the Historical Narrative

Making a Pig of the Humanities: Re-centering the Historical Narrative