Professional Ideology Research Articles

Understanding Addiction: A Threefold Phenomenological Approach

There are many ways of interpreting the behaviours related to substance misuse and addiction, which can be sort out as three basic models: biomedical, legal, and social. They are corresponding to approaches built in different epistemic and professional frameworks, such as medicine, law, and social work. Confronted with the experience of addiction, these models appear as pre-determined by a specific scientific or professional ideology; they presuppose a pre-understanding of the phenomena. I directed, therefore, my investigation on those phenomenological paths that might lead to, and circumscribe the experience of addiction and I propose an analytical framework based on three major phenomenological perspectives: descriptive, genetic, and inter-relational. This paper argues in favour of defining addiction without making reference to a form of failure, psycho-somatic or existential. On the contrary, it concludes that there is a need to adopt a definition of addiction which holds at its core the idea of empowering addicted persons, of re-constructing their capacity to take decisions about their own lives.

EDITORIAL NOTE

Before Tony La Vopa had joined Nick Phillipson and me in founding Modern Intellectual History in 2004, Tony had successfully traveled in the spiral spirit of Vico's philosophy of history. Born in the Bronx to a Catholic Italian-American father and Irish-American mother, educated at the Jesuit Boston College and later at Cornell University, Tony launched his scholarly career as an intellectually inflected social historian with his book Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge UP, 1988). Then, while much of the historical profession was abandoning social history for the seemingly more capacious field of cultural history, he deepened further his strongly intellectual and social history approach in his Mosse Prize-winning rendering of the identity and career of a single poor but tremendously ambitious young philosopher. In Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 (Cambridge UP, 2001), he embedded his striving scholar in a thick web of political and religious discourses, which Fichte tried both to penetrate and transcend through his rigorously soaring philosophy of the Transcendental “I.” Currently, Tony is completing a manuscript titled Manly Thoughts. The Labor of the Mind and the Specter of Effeminacy in Enlightenment Cultures. Promising to offer a fascinating further extension of his socio-intellectual method, the book will serve as a timely capstone of his career as one of the Enlightenment's preeminent historians working today.

What Is a Dominant Language?: Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality

What Is a Dominant Language?Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality Pascale Casanova (bio) Translated by Marlon Jones In my The World Republic of Letters, I feel I neglected one topic, or at least did not explore it thoroughly enough, despite its importance in a world republic: the question of translation. I revisited an article I had written around a decade ago, whose original findings remain valid, but I made some new discoveries which, by the same token, made the topic more intelligible and interesting.1 I therefore intend to continue my inquiry into world literature and consider translation through historical bilingualism. Amongst the millions of living and extinct languages in history, it seems there has always been one that was more "prestigious" than the other contemporary language or languages. In other words, it appears that the notion of "equality" among languages, even if it is true in an absolute sense, is completely false in practice, even though it has always been presented as a compulsory belief, necessary for the normal function of the linguistic grouping in question: it is highly unpopular to say or believe the contrary. This view is, to use Bourdieu's term, "a professional ideology," the profession in this case being that of linguists. This type of ideology is difficult to interrogate and, as Jacques Bouveresse writes, it "always presents a noble, idealized and sublimated image of what the profession in question really is."2 "Prestige" comes from the Latin praestigium, meaning, according to Larousse, "imposture, illusion," or "illusion produced by magic or a spell," thus "ascendancy, enticement, attraction, charm. It is a sort of power based on illusion." It becomes clear that all world languages have always been affected by this difference. The "prestigious" language will (in a completely arbitrary way, through the simple fact of its "prestige") exert its power and domination over other languages. The asymmetrical relationship between Latin and Greek, as we shall see, provides an excellent example from antiquity. In this way, languages do not exist in and for themselves, but in their mutual relationships; one cannot claim to know or analyze them without considering these relationships that bind them to others. [End Page 379] One of the major literary axioms revealed by The World Republic of Letters is that a collective bilingualism or plurilingualism (what American sociolinguist Charles Ferguson calls "forced") is an unmistakable sign of domination;3 in symmetrical fashion, monolingualism belongs to speakers using a dominant language (or dominated languages that are particularly closed off, as with Greek, some years ago, and Portuguese).4 These are the signs by which we can distinguish, immediately, a dominant language from a dominated one. There is a dominant language if (and only if) speakers believe in the difference; there is, furthermore, only one way to effectively resist a dominant language, which is to adopt an "atheist" stance, and not to believe in the dominant language's prestige, but to be convinced of the totally arbitrary nature of its domination. Abram De Swaan, who has studied these global-level phenomena extensively, maintains that what he calls "the global language system" derives its coherence from multilingualism.5 In de Swaan's view, we can measure the centrality (which I would call domination) of a language by the number of plurilingual speakers who speak it in a system he describes as a "floral figuration," meaning a system in which all peripheral languages are linked to the center by plurilinguals.6 A language is dominant if (and only if) it is a second language used by bilinguals or polyglots around the world. It is not the number of speakers that determines whether it is dominant or not (otherwise, Mandarin would be the dominant language). The criterion is, rather, the number of plurilingual speakers who "choose" it. This is why the dominant language is also the one favored in all translations, both in projects translating into the language in question as well as those translating from it into another one. In the first case, it is understood by plurilingual speakers from every language background, and, in this sense, from a broader spectrum than others (allowing plurilingual speakers of other languages to read it). In the second...

In the service of God and the parish: Professional ideologies and managerial control in the Church of Sweden

Professional ideologies are not only shared norms, beliefs, and values but also ‘operational philosophies’ – actual practices – that both constitute and regulate a professional community. Professional ideologies may both accommodate and even embrace certain managerial practices and counteract them if they are regarded as a threat to professional jurisdictions and other privileges. A study of ministers of the Church of Sweden, the established church in Sweden, demonstrates that new demands for managerial control, deriving from shrinking financial resources as the church loses members, are, on the one hand, recognized in terms of providing a joint perspective on the activities of the parish while, on the other, there is a significant skepticism toward more elaborate evaluation methods and performance metrics. For ministers, religious services must not be regarded as being like any other market-based activity, and the church, as a faith-based organization, needs to carefully position itself vis-à-vis industry and public administration. The study contributes to the professionalism literature, the accounting literature, and the study of faith-based organizations.

Pasteur's Quadrant as the Bridge Linking Rigor with Relevance

A tension exists between educational practitioners and researchers, which is often attributed to their dichotomous and oftentimes polarizing professional ideologies or Discourse communities. When determining what works in education, researchers tend to emphasize evidence-based practices (EBPs) supported by research that is rigorous and internally valid, whereas practitioners tend to value practice-based evidence (PBE) that is relevant and externally valid. The authors argue that these separate mindsets stem from the classical view of research as being either rigorous or relevant. In his canonical Pasteur's Quadrant, Stokes (1997) proposed that rigor and relevance are complementary notions that, when merged, further the production, translation, and implementation of instructional practices that are both rigorous (i.e., evidence-based) and relevant (i.e., practice-based). The authors propose educational design research (EDR) and communities of practice (CoPs) as frameworks through which to realize the promise of Pasteur's quadrant.

Re-imagining crisis reporting: Professional ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images

This study, based on interviews with journalists representing major news organizations in Finland and Sweden, explores how the professional ideology of journalists is shaped by the international trend of citizen witnessing. Citizen-created photographs and videos that have become a routine feature of mainstream news coverage are approached as a potential force of change that transforms professional imaginaries of journalism vis-a-vis crisis events. From journalists’ lines of thought three interpretative repertoires were identified: resistance, resignation and renewal. Our results hint at a rethinking of the professional norms and roles of journalists.

Cultivating the media activist: How critical media literacy and critical service learning can reform journalism education

The task of journalism education has been defined in relation to both the professional needs of the journalism industry and the need to educate well-informed citizens. A key part of journalism education involves introducing students to what Deuze (2005) terms the professional ideology of journalism, which includes commitments to public service, commitments to impartiality or objectivity, and a belief in the ideal of journalistic autonomy. Deuze has argued that this professional ideology has shifted in response to multiculturalism and new media. This article therefore sets out to explore the implications of these changes for journalism education and for the formation of the worldview of student journalists. The article considers a case study of a project involving critical service learning in an introductory class for journalism students. The article proposes that media activism, public journalism, and critical service learning may be drawn upon in journalism education as resources in the formation of an emergent journalistic worldview. Exploring student responses to this project through a framework of Youth Participatory Action Research, the article argues that such efforts can help journalism educators to achieve the pedagogical goal of enabling students to critique existing arrangements of power and develop a globally sensitive perspective while producing news stories across media platforms that reflect a deep appreciation for learning about and understanding the diverse communities they serve.

Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction by Stephen Schryer (review)

Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction by Stephen Schryer (review)

The Influence of Local Culture on the Ideology of Samoan Journalism

Much research implicitly suggests that journalism values arise from culturally removed organizational structures and shared occupational training. Further, few studies examine the perspective of journalism from both audiences and journalists. These omissions are important given the essentiality of mutually constructed and culturally embedded normative behaviors within journalism. This research examines audiences and journalists in Samoa, a country purposefully selected as a recently independent, post-colonial, country that relies upon a very traditional, shared national identity for it's relatively nascent identificatory cohesion. This study aims to gain a better understanding of how local culture can set parameters and expectations for journalism; how journalists negotiate culture into their own professional ideology; and how audiences understand journalism within a cultural context.

Holistic Pregnancy Care: Aligning Complementary and Alternative Medicine With Midwifery Practice

BACKGROUND:The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to manage pregnancy-related conditions is becoming increasingly popular. This article draws on a qualitative study that aimed to explain the processes midwives engaged when determining the role of these therapies for pregnancy care.METHODOLOGY:Our study used grounded theory methodology. Twenty-five midwives, who were employed in metropolitan hospitals situated in Victoria, Australia, participated in the study. Data was collected from semistructured interviews and nonparticipant observation of a subgroup over an 18-month period.RESULTS:Midwives’ attitudes and behavior toward the CAM was influenced by their professional ideology and knowledge. When participants considered the role of these therapies, they employed various strategies including aligning CAM with midwifery philosophy, using the therapies to increase women’s options, valuing diverse ways of understanding and seeking out professional knowledge.CONCLUSIONS:Although midwives do not reject conventional medicine, many value the opportunity CAM offers to individualize care and promote natural childbearing.

Situated Professionalism: Exploring the Tension between Incentives and Professional Ideology (WITHDRAWN)

I develop a theory about situated professionalism by exploring how professionals resolve the competing influences of professional ideology – their formal codes of ethics and norms – and financial i...

Pasteur's Quadrant as the Bridge Linking Rigor with Relevance

A tension exists between educational practitioners and researchers, which is often attributed to their dichotomous and oftentimes polarizing professional ideologies or Discourse communities. When determining what works in education, researchers tend to emphasize evidence-based practices (EBPs) supported by research that is rigorous and internally valid, whereas practitioners tend to value practice-based evidence (PBE) that is relevant and externally valid. The authors argue that these separate mindsets stem from the classical view of research as being either rigorous or relevant. In his canonical Pasteur's Quadrant, Stokes (1997) proposed that rigor and relevance are complementary notions that, when merged, further the production, translation, and implementation of instructional practices that are both rigorous (i.e., evidence-based) and relevant (i.e., practice-based). The authors propose educational design research (EDR) and communities of practice (CoPs) as frameworks through which to realize the promise of Pasteur's quadrant.

Предисловие переводчика к статье Ч.Р. Миллса

Abstract: The article considers historical and intellectual circumstances of the publication of C. Whight Mills' paper “Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists”. It shows that this paper is of obvious historical interest because it allows to trace the evolution of Mills' own ideas as well as the development of the American sociology in 1930-40s. It also shows that this paper is one of the first attempts in reflective sociology, and therefore it can be used by today sociologists in the analysis of the foundations of sociological knowledge.

Identification work in the construction industry

PurposeOrganizations are sites where identities are constructed and maintained and a substantial literature points at identity work as being of central importance for managerial practice. Identities are often fragile and contingent constructs, shifting over time and as the actor moves between assignments, being bound up with professional and occupational ideologies, norm and beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to report a study of how construction workers build their occupational identities on the basis of a combination of identification with their work and the quality they deliver benefitting the end‐user and what Elsbach and Bhattacharya call disidentification, i.e. a critique of the construction industry.Design/methodology/approachA study of identity work in the construction industry suggests that identities are based on three interrelated processes, the enactment of normative beliefs of ideal selves, the recognition of the accomplishments in the present construction project work, and the disidentification with the construction industry articulated in storytelling practices.FindingsConstruction workers’ identities are thus a patchwork, stitching together a variety of heterogeneous resources. This makes identity work an ongoing social process influenced by both the material conditions of the actual work and norms, beliefs, and aspirations.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the identity literature by emphasizing that identities are irreducible to either material conditions, norm and beliefs, or narrative accounts but are simultaneously drawing on all these resources.

Out of Place: Madness in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (review)

Reviewed by: Out of Place: Madness in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea Barbara Andersen Out of Place: Madness in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, by Michael Goddard. Social Identities 6. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. ISBN cloth, 978-0-85745-094-4; xiv + 173 pages, preface, acknowledgments, map, appendixes, references, index. Cloth, US$70.00. This unique exploration of madness in Papua New Guinea stands out for several reasons. While its central insight is not surprising—that in the mid-1980s the Kakoli people of the Upper Kaugel Valley lacked a concept of "mental illness" and, on the rare occasions when they used psychiatric services, saw them chiefly as a means of restraining destructive or violent madpeople—the data collected by Michael Goddard is both fascinating and sensitively presented. Though framed by the author as an anthropological critique of the premises and practice of transcultural psychiatry, I would suggest that this book's strongest feature is its careful rendering of the unknowns of ethnographic fieldwork—those situations and circumstances in which the gap between ways of being in the world is so profound as to thwart efforts at interpretation. Having had a quarter century to reevaluate these materials (the book is based on his PhD thesis), the author remains uncertain of what, if anything, precipitated the madness of his informants. This radical uncertainty is an epistemologically positive posture in an increasingly "applied" scholarly context in which cultural explanations for disorder are both ready-to-hand and too often essentially vacant. In his introduction, Goddard notes that the people among whom he lived in 1985-1986 found his research topic puzzling. For the Kakoli, there was nothing to learn about the mad. Not only were their problems nonmental in nature, they appeared to lack any knowable cause that could be generalized across cases. The madpeople known to the Kakoli were so different from one another that they did not comprise a social or natural "type." Though all were described as kekelepa— an Umbu Ungu term Goddard translates roughly as "leaving a group or place" (70)—so were the intoxicated, the estranged, and the disobedient. To refurbish a phrase from Michel Foucault on homosexuality, kekelepa people were not a species. To the extent that they permit explanation, kekelepa episodes are for Goddard "part of the dialectics of Kakoli sociality" (6), collectively constructed "exercise[s] in moral iconography" (3) rather than forms of individual pathology or cultural disorder. Chapter 1 outlines the history of psychiatry in Papua New Guinea, from early twentieth century concerns [End Page 460] about mentally deranged "natives" going "amok," to the post-World War II shift toward institutional confinement, tranquilizing drugs, and electroshock therapy, to the "community-based care" framework of the ethnographic present. The history is much enriched by personal interviews with Dr B G Burton-Bradley, head of Papua New Guinea's mental health services under Australian rule, and Dr Wilfred Moi, the assistant secretary for mental health at the time of Goddard's fieldwork. Chapter 2 explores the basic contradiction belying this narrative of progress: despite changes in professional ideology and official policy, Goddard argues, psychiatric service provision has remained mostly unchanged since the 1960s. At the level of practice, psychiatry in Papua New Guinea is an apparatus of constraint and control, and patients usually have considerably more contact with law enforcement officers than with mental health professionals. In this context, "culturally sensitive" psychiatry does little more than provide an ideological justification for what is essentially incarceration—it is a "paper concept" (60) with no relevance for patients and their families or for health workers, whose foremost concern is controlling patients' extreme behaviors. Goddard illustrates this point with seven case studies from the 1970s and 1980s of patients from the Kaugel Valley who received psychiatric treatment at hospitals in Mt Hagen, Mendi, and Goroka. In all cases, patients were hospitalized after acts of violence or property damage (or, in the case of one female patient, mood swings and aggression combined with promiscuity), and cultural factors were completely absent from both diagnostic and therapeutic efforts. Chapter 3 describes the "ambivalent" use of psychiatric services by the Kakoli despite their non-subscription to, and lack of...

Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post–World War II America / Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction / Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America

Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post–World War II America / Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction / Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America

Prosecution and Prosecutors in Poland: In Quest of Independence

The Polish procuracy has developed only since the nation regained statehood in 1918. Before World War II, following the French model, it was subordinate to the Ministry of Justice. Under the communist system, although theoretically independent, it was organized according to the Soviet example and subservient to the Communist Party. After the fall of communism, the procuracy partly returned to its prewar structure; however, it is haunted by ghosts from its communist past. One crucial problem concerns political independence. Although in theory procurators are career professionals appointed on merit, the procuracy has never obtained real independence from political influence and has been plagued by the consequences of being subordinate to the Ministry of Justice. This was reinforced by the mentality of individual procurators “socialized” into the values of the communist procuracy and transmitting their professional ideology to younger generations. Recent reforms aim to provide greater independence. A second problem relates to the particularities of the continental system of criminal procedure, in which the procuracy is both an investigating and a prosecuting agency subject to a “principle of mandatory prosecution” that produces mechanical and sometimes perverse results.

Transnational trigger constellations: Reconstructing the story behind the story

Understanding how the topics of news stories are socially constructed through journalistic practices is an important question for the study of journalism. We contribute to this strand of research by reconstructing the process of news making from the perspective of the journalists. The method used for this purpose is the comparative reconstruction of the ‘biographies’ of news stories by interviewing the authors of news stories. This was done during the same two weeks covering European news in 23 elite, popular and regional newspapers in six countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Denmark and Austria). A cluster analysis identifies the complex constellations of different components that trigger European news making. Four trigger constellations co-exist that represent different sets of journalistic practices of news making. These transnational patterns of journalistic practices show that journalism is not only a professional community based on a common professional ideology, but that journalism is a transnational community of practice.

Comparison of the Social and Professional Ideology of Caseworkers and Community Social Workers in Israel

This article seeks to study whether caseworkers and community social workers subscribe to similar social work values, such as promoting social change and social justice, by comparing the social and professional ideologies of 123 caseworkers and 113 community social workers in Israel. The findings reveal that the community social workers consistently showed a greater social orientation than the caseworkers. They were more inclined than the caseworkers to believe that the government is responsible for social provision and to support universal benefits. They were less inclined to believe that the welfare state has negative effects on its recipients and placed more emphasis on the social-structural causes of poverty. They attributed greater importance than the caseworkers to the goal of promoting social justice and were more inclined to believe that social workers should engage in community development and policy practice. However, alongside the differences, members of both groups attributed importance to social justice and government responsibility for welfare, and favoured social-structural explanations of poverty.

The Future of Biosocial Criminology

In this article we describe how the ascendency of biosocial criminology challenges the “sacred values” of the discipline, values that have in the past elevated the professional ideology of criminologists over science. We argue that biosocial criminology can lead to a criminology this is rooted more in science and empirical observation than in ideology and that biosocial criminology can link criminology to a diverse array of other disciplines and research methodologies. The forces that would diminish or restrain biosocial criminology, however, cannot be discounted.