Level Of Everyday Practice Research Articles

Marx’s Theories and Beyond: Understanding Working-Class Solidarity in China

Derived from post-industrial society experiences, current social theorists often argue that the working class no longer plays an active role in transforming society, thereby making the issue of working-class solidarity obsolete. This paper critically revisits Marx’s theories on solidarity and re-engages the debates by intersecting macro structural analysis with micro-foundation of working-class solidarity. The article formulates the concept of working-class solidarity in two layers of analysis: the first is a macro structural approach driven by class conflict, social grievance, and economic crisis directly connected to the social transformation of the neoliberal market economy; and the second looks at micro process of cooperation and mutual support at the level of everyday practice, that is, a collective-emotional environment that creates agency and a soft solidarity base for building bonds among working-class youth. The logic of solidarity is rescued through a multiplicity of working-class youth’s behaviors discovered in school and the workplace.

“Medicine Is Not Business, Health Is Not a Commodity, Physicians Are Not Salesmen!” Clinical Labor and Ukraine’s Health Reform

AbstractIn 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament approved a bill that marked the start of long‐awaited health care reform. Yet it met opposition from the Trade Union of Health Care Workers, which organized a mass protest against the proposed reform. I argue that the union’s resistance can be understood as an accrual of insecurity experienced by providers of clinical labor in Ukraine’s changing health sector in the last several decades. Although no comprehensive overhaul of the health care system had taken place until 2017, there have been changes on the level of everyday practice; these changes have left health care providers disillusioned about the commitment and expertise of politicians to effect positive change in the health sector, forced them to combine several lines of work to generate enough income, and have left them and their patients vulnerable to the market. Supporters of the union found that the language of the reform lacked a commitment to social protections, and instead it focused on poor health indicators, eliminating inefficiencies, cost‐saving mechanisms, and physicians’ failures in providing quality care. Trade union demands have attempted to refocus the narrative by drawing attention to the difficult conditions faced by clinical labor in Ukraine and the need to recommit to health care as a human right.

When funding fails: Planetary exploration at NASA in an era of austerity, 1967-1976.

We can learn most about how science funding works when it stops working. Like moments of breakdown surfacing the inner workings of infrastructure, periodic fiscal crises reveal the social life of science funds at the level of everyday practice. Through a case study of NASA-funded planetary science in an era of austerity, the article explores how scientists navigate uncertain funding environments and articulate financially defensible projects. Examining the development of the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury in the aftermath of a significant downturn in science support, the article offers a middle path between the macro-politics of government funding and the micro-politics of doing science. In shaping how the mission was conceived and later operated, Mariner 10's cost-driven paradigm translated the austerity of the period into the projectized work of robotic spaceflight missions.

Reconstituting Automobility: The Influence of Non-Commercial Carsharing on the Meanings of Automobility and the Car

Automobility has long been understood as the normal and hegemonic way of moving and even without considering a global pandemic and the imperative of social distancing, disruptive change in everyday automobility seems far away. Based on 34 interviews with members of carsharing associations and private carsharing arrangements, this article argues that non-commercial carsharing, a self-organized form of carsharing, poses a twofold challenge to the hegemonic meanings of automobility on the level of everyday practice. First, the car’s role as status symbol is fading and overridden as an object of utility that is only used when absolutely necessary and mostly for leisure purposes. Second, the car is losing its position as the realization of individual freedom and the coercive aspects of the car and automobility become strongly present amongst non-commercial carsharers. Thereby, automobility emerges as an ambivalent issue and becomes perceived as means of liberation and means of domination simultaneously. By working with and against automobility’s hegemonic meanings on the level of everyday practice, non-commercial carsharing is changing the system of automobility from within and bears the potential for substantially altering the reproduction of the system of automobility.

What does precision crop production hold for the future of soil science and plant nutrition?

The concept of precision agriculture is straightforward at the scientific level but even basic goals are blurred at the level of everyday practice in the Hungarian crop production despite the fact that several elements of the new technology have already been applied. The industrial and the service sectors offer many products and services to the farmers but crop producers do not get enough support to choose between different alternatives. Agricultural higher education must deliver this support directly to the farmers and via the released young graduates. The price of agricultural land must be higher if well-organized data underpin the production potential of the fields. Accumulated database is a form of capital. It must be owned by the farmers but in a data-driven economy its sharing will generate value for both farmers and the society as a whole.
 We present a methodological approach in which simple models were applied to predict yield by using only those yield data which spatially coincide with the soil data and the remaining yield data and the models were used to test different sampling and interpolation approaches commonly applied in precision agriculture. Three strategies for composite sample collection and three interpolation methods were compared. Multiple regression models were developed to predict yields. R2 values were used to select among the applied methods.

Disorder and Civilization: The Future(s) of Ukrainian Medicine

Post-socialist societies are full of uncertainty, fragmentation, and competing discourses on social justice (Steinberg and Wanner 2008; Zigon 2011). This article focuses on how Ukrainian physicians envision the future, present, and past of the health-care system and make sense of social change in their professional lives and society more broadly. The Ukrainian health- care system has remained largely untouched by post-socialist reforms, but it is nevertheless undergoing profound changes. These changes are occurring on the level of everyday practice and are shifting responsibility away from the state and onto the individual. The author traces how physicians navigate the persisting structures of the old system, and what hopes they carry for the present and the future. Post-socialist health care is bursting with competing interests, commitments, and notions of how health-care providers should re- late to each other, their patients, administrations, and the state in general. This article therefore draws on physicians' narratives of the disorder in health care through the interpretive prism of 'ruination … as a process that weighs on the future and shapes the present' and that represents a 'vital reconfi guration' (Stoler 2008: 194) or crafting of 'hope' (Lindquist 2006).

Studenti o politici i nacionalnoj identifikaciji u sportu

This paper discusses the results of the research on politics and national identification in the sports, which was conducted among the students of the Faculty of Sports and Physical Education at the University of Kosovska Mitrovica, Niš and Banja Luka. This study included a total of 464 students, and it was conducted in April and May 2013 in Leposavić, Niš and Banja Luka. The main goal of this research is to determine to which extent the students recognize the influence of politics in the sports at the level of everyday practice, and how they view the process of consolidation and expression of national identity in sports. This paper also points to the relevant theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding politics, sports and national identity, as well as their mutual relations. The results of the survey show that students recognize not only the impact of politics in sports but also the expression of national identification in sports competitions, as well as in the events relating to them, in which an exceptional role is played by the media of mass communication. In their responses to the questions, the students indicated that the politics has a major impact on the sports, and that sports have a significant impact on politics, noting that the success of the top sportsmen, especially in international competitions, encourage the awakening of national feelings, strengthen national identification and contribute to the strengthening of patriotism. This effect is particularly reinforced by the behavior and statements of top athletes in the media, after major sporting results, as well as the statements of the highest state officials on these occasions. That is why these achievements are of great significance for the promotion of the state and the nation, but they are, on the other hand, also very useful for personal promotion of politicians and political parties in power. The students also observed the importance of the role of the symbolic features in sports, and, in this context, claim that the emblems, coats of arms, and other national symbols on the sports gear contribute to the strengthening of national identity. Regarding the attitude that the athletes in international competitions should sing the national anthem, most students, especially from Leposavić, believe that it is their obligation to do so. It is particularly significant that almost all the students emphasize that the hooligan behavior of fans at sports events insults their national feelings.

The Tunisian School Time allocated to the Matter of Sport and Physical Education

The Physical education and sports in schools contributes not only to the first good fitness and good health of students, but also helps young to achieve performance and better understand physical activity, with positive impact throughout life. In addition, physical education provides knowledge and transferable skills such as teamwork, fair play, respect grows, the body and social awareness, and provides general understanding of the rules that students can easily use in other school subjects or situations of life. Due to its many benefits, the promotion of physical activity has been increased at International level attention. Our research aims to probe the real situation of the matter within the school system from the time allocated to the matter at the law and above the level of everyday practice. 74 teachers of both sexes participated in this study. 48 male teachers with mean age (21, 5±8, 8), and 26 female teachers (mean age: 17±10, 9).We used two investigative tools. First an analysis of the laws governing the organization of teaching matters and school time to prep school and colleges (laws, decrees and ministerial notes).Second, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of schedules of a sample of teachers for two consecutive years (2007/2008 and 2008/2009). Our results chow a low use of the morning session in the teaching of EPS at the beginning and the weekend (Monday and Saturday) with a rate of (17%) compared to the average. Moreover, the peak hours during the day are located in the middle of the morning sessions (9am to 11am) and afternoon (15h to 17h).

The Peril and Promise of Noodles and Beer: Condemnation of patronage and hybrid political frameworks in “post‐neoliberal” Cochabamba, Bolivia

In this article, I analyze Bolivians’ public condemnations of patronage—the buying of political support with jobs or favors—over the past decade. The rise of indigenous and leftist governments in Latin America has led many to hope for a transition from neoliberalism. In Bolivia, the new Morales government has promised to effect this transition in part by rooting out clientelismo and peguismo (patronage job seeking), long a mainstay of Bolivian politics. I argue, however, that at the level of everyday practice, Bolivians engage hybrid ideals—of patronage, populism, state capitalism, liberalism, and left‐indigenist democracy. Focusing on debates over patronage in the central Bolivian Cochabamba region, I show that most people who denounced patronage were unable to avoid others’ counterdenunciations that they were buscapegas (patronage seekers). Furthermore, while residents of Sacaba often expressed a yearning for ideological purity by denouncing patronage, they also used the language of patron–client reciprocity to assert demands for radical democracy.

Avoiding Recolonisation in Early Childhood: Promoting Local Values as Mediators in the Spread of Globalisation

This article seeks to draw attention to ways in which culturally based values and practices can and should influence implementation of globalised approaches to early childhood education and care across diverse contexts. Recent discussions have drawn attention to complexities associated with assimilation of globalised notions across diverse cultural contexts. This article is situated within such discussions, highlighting patterns of differentiation in the spread of globalisation across aspects of policy and practice. The article's position is that wider promotion of such patterns, as processes through which local values might mediate the impact of globalisation on early childhood services, will support avoidance of global ‘recolonisation’ of policy and practice. To illustrate, the article draws on examples from Hong Kong, where wide-ranging educational reforms were implemented following withdrawal of the British colonial government in 1997. A range of mixed responses to the reforms has prompted valuable discussions around challenges associated with framing educational development around globalised ideals. These responses are taken as a basis from which to suggest that, while governments across the globe may share a commitment to key goals for early childhood, local values can and should inform approaches to achieving such goals at the level of everyday practice.

Transition processes and pathways across Austrian long-term care provision. Lessons to be learnt in a European context

Purpose: To draw attention to incentives and disincentives inherent in current health and social care provision in Austria by following common and possible pathways of an older and care dependent person across the Austrian long-term care system. To learn from continuity and discontinuity in transition processes as well as from elements of national and European good practice, which may serve to fill gaps and bridge missing links. Context: Ageing societies have significantly changed the demand towards current health and social care provision. In particular, a strong increase in multi-morbidity and chronic diseases, often affecting all different dimensions of human life, has elucidated the urgent need for intensified cooperation and better coordination within and between health and social care provision. However, transition processes, which may efficiently link the different health and social care service sectors and which allow to optimally and with dignity deal with complex individual situations, are often hindered or even blocked by inappropriate regulations or disincentives inherent in the present systems. The adverse effects of such disincentives usually become apparent in regularly recurring troubles and sometimes even paradox situations for users and providers at the level of everyday practice. To follow the pathway of a common example case and to use it for a systematic survey and analysis of transition processes at the practical level is expected to facilitate the insight in underlying incentives and disincentives. To additionally put such pathways in a wider European context and comparison allows the highlighting of national and international initiatives of good practice and to bring to light regulations, which are well or inappropriately adapted to current needs.

Scale and ethnicity in Southeast Poland: tourism in the European periphery1

This paper discusses the staging of Ukrainian ethnicity during the celebrations of Kupaly Night, an annual community ritual in Southeast Poland. The argument embarks from an analysis of changing nation state policies in Poland after state socialism and emphasises the growing influence of European Union (EU) policies on the public representation of ethnicity. These policies have moved ethnicity from the level of everyday practice, but also from an arena of political tensions, into an institutionalised and policy dominated form of identification. In the region of Przemy´sl, where the events under scrutiny take place, tourism is another key factor facilitating the establishment of market forces in projects of heritage preservation, multiculturalism and the promotion of ethnic particularities. My analysis of how these factors have impeded on the region shows the emergence of a multicultural development project that does not have a unifying but an ambivalent effect. The paper investigates the way in which the Ukrainian minority in Przemy´sl is subject to wider processes of re-scaling ethnic policies from the national to both the European and the regional level and is in this process turned into a commodifiable group valued by the EU, the state, tourists and locals for its distinctive culture. I thus demonstrate the ambivalent relationship between ritual practice, public representations of authenticity, ethno-tourism and social change influenced by EU policies and discourses.

Diagnoses by general practitioners: Accuracy and reliability

Only 10% of the results of consultations in primary care can be assigned to a confirmed diagnosis, while 50% remain “symptoms” and 40% are classified as “named syndromes” (“picture of a disease”). Moreover, less than 20% of the most frequent diagnoses account for more than 80% of the results of consultations. This finding, confirmed empirically during the last fifty years, suggests a power law distribution, with critical consequences for diagnosis and decision making in primary care.Our results prove that primary care has a severe “black swan” element in the vast majority of consultations. Some critical cases involving “avoidable life-threatening dangerous developments” (ALDD) such as myocardial disturbance, brain bleeding, and appendicitis may be masked by those often vague symptoms of health disorders ranked in the 20% most frequent diagnoses. The Braun distribution predicts the frequency of health disorders on a phenomenological level and reveals the “black swan” problem, but is not a tool by itself for arriving at accurate diagnoses. To improve predictions and enhance the reliability of diagnoses we propose standards of documentation and a systematic manner by which the risk facing a patient with an uncertain diagnosis can be evaluated (diagnostic protocols).Accepting a power law distribution in primary care implies the following: (1) primary care should no longer be defined only by “low prevalence” properties, but also by its black-swan-incidence-problem. This includes rethinking malpractice and the requirements of malpractice litigations; (2) at the level of everyday practice, diagnostic protocols are tools to make diagnoses more reliable; (3) at the level of epidemiology, Braun’s system of classification is useful for generating valid information by which predictions of risks can be improved.

Promoting choice and control in residential services for people with learning disabilities

This paper discusses the gap between policy goals and practice in residential services for people with learning disabilities. Drawing on a nine month ethnographic study of three residential services, it outlines a range of obstacles to the promotion of choice and control that were routinely observed in the culture and working practices of the services. Issues discussed include conflicting service values and agendas, inspection regimes, an attention to the bigger decisions in a person's life when empowerment could more quickly and effectively be promoted at the level of everyday practice, problems of communication and interpretation and the pervasiveness of teaching. We offer a range of suggestions as to how these obstacles might be tackled.

Prison officer training and practice in Nigeria

Prisons and prison guards in Africa remain understudied and ill understood and are most often represented in the literature as objects/subjects of critique or targets of reform. To begin to redress this balance, drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among prison officers in Nigeria, this article examines prison officer training and the penal philosophy and practice of the Nigerian Prisons Service. Documentation of the contradictions of prison training practice reveals how pretensions to discipline, order and hierarchy are challenged both from below and above at the level of everyday practice. What look like hegemonic practices are, not surprisingly, contested and contradictory. Via a partial ethnography of prison training school practice the article presents a challenge to reform agencies seeking to transform penal institutions via methods that assume the homogeneity of the targeted institutions. A suggestion is made that perhaps the contested nature of penal practices in the South may encourage reform agencies to reconfigure their own identities by tapping in to internal contradictions rather than trying to impose change from without. A space for re-imagining reform strategies is framed that takes the potential but inevitable contradictions and ambiguities of prison practice as its reference point.

The Role of Language in Object Transcendence

Of all the ways to speak of transcendence, the perception of objects as spatially and temporally transcendent to us would seem to be one of the more mundane. So allow me to make the case right at the start as to why understanding how Hans-Georg Gadamer explains our perceptual awareness of objects is interesting and relevant. First, there is the general point that to fully appreciate Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics we need to take seriously its place within the phenomenological tradition; the nature of perception has been a central theme from the beginnings of phenomenology, and the nature of our awareness of objects as transcendent has been a central theme of the nature of perception. That things are experienced as irreducible to the way they are experienced-experienced as having being beyond their appearance-is our most common encounter with transcendence. When we think of transcendence as moving out from us or as going beyond something-that is, when we think of it as best captured through spatial metaphors-it is because we are drawing on this most familiar sense of transcendence, the transcendence of spatial-temporal objects. Gadamer inherits from classical phenomenology the view that perception is directly of the objects of perception; perception is not mediated through ideas or representations, rather "consciousness is," as he puts it, "according to its own essential structure, already with objects."1 Since there is disagreement among phenomenologists about how object perception should be best characterized, it is worth knowing where Gadamer stands on the issue; however, since he did not write anything extensive or detailed about the nature of perception, knowing where he stands will take some interpretive reconstruction. Second, Hubert Dreyfus has joined a debate around John McDowell's denial of the possibility of a non-conceptual awareness of objects. Two things make this debate relevant to Gadamerians. First, McDowell appeals to Gadamer to help respond to a pressing concern with his view. If we start from McDowell's view that human perception is the actualization of conceptual capacities, how can we explain the continuities between the way mature humans perceive the world and the way beings that lack those conceptual capacities, such as infants or non-human animals, perceive the world?2 McDowell relies on Gadamer's distinction between an environment and a world: animals exist in an environment, driven by solving problems related to their biological imperatives; humans live in a world toward which we are conceptually oriented to allow for reflection and action in ways not simply reducible to biological imperatives. Dreyfus thinks that McDowell under-appreciates the resources the phenomenological tradition provides for a richer understanding of the meaningfulness of embodied, skillfully coping, non-conceptual actions.3 He argues that Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty provide the tools for understanding the origins and the nature of the perceptual transcendence of objects. Separately, Dreyfus has criticized Gadamer for not taking "a stand on Heidegger's claim that there is a level of everyday practice (the Vorhabe) beneath our theoretical presuppositions and assumptions (the Vorsicht),"4 and this objection connects to his objection against McDowell. So Gadamer has been drafted into the debate on the side of the Sellarsian McDowell, while Dreyfus presents his response as phenomenology's response to McDowell. By laying out Gadamer's actual views about the way we are aware of objects as transcendent, we can better position him with respect to the issues at stake between Dreyfus and McDowell on the possibility of non-conceptual perception. The general question I want to address is this: How does Gadamer articulate object transcendence?5 The four key claims that he makes are: (1) that the body is first and foremost an opening to the world and is incapable of being fully objectified; (2) that the way the world is disclosed spatially according to our bodies parallels the way the world is disclosed conceptually through language; (3) that the bodily disclosure of objects is not prior (temporally or logically) to the linguistic disclosure of objects; and (4) that there is in the perception of objects a double transcendence, a spatial-temporal transcendence that reveals the object as surpassing any particular appearance of it, and a linguistic/conceptual transcendence revealing it as not just an individual object, but an object disclosable though language, and, as such, conceptually relatable to other objects. …

Developing a Theory of Gender as Practice

In her feminist lecture 'Said and Done' versus 'Saying and Doing,' Patricia Yancey Martin gives us an exceptionally clear and useful review of the problems of theorizing in organizational contexts. Yancey Martin has been working on these issues for more than a decade (cf. Yancey Martin 1990), in a multifaceted research agenda that is one of the key contributions to the current Anglophone sociology of gender. This article crystallizes a conceptual perspective that has been emerging in her work. Drawing on a range of theories and on fieldwork in large U.S. corporations, Yancey Martin argues that is a pervasive feature at the level of everyday practice in notionally ungendered organizations. She proposes the concept of a two-sided dynamic in organizational life: gendering practices, which embody institutionalized distinctions, and the process of practicing gender, in which particular people constitute relations in their continuing workplace activity. In developing these concepts, Yancey Martin is grappling with the glaring contradiction that faces every researcher on in the workplace. In modem organizations, gross inequalities (for instance, the exclusion of women from top management, occupational segregation, inequalities of income, inequalities of respect) coexist with apparently gender-neutral organizational norms (as described in classic theories of bureaucracy). Often, large inequalities coexist with a complete denial of any bias or prejudice. Yancey Martin is directing us to a level of reality that is, as she insightfully argues, hard to describe in text and hard to pin down in research. This practice of is local, subtle, often instantaneous, often barely noticed or made a theme in conversation. It is not what researchers can document in a questionnaire, not even (or not easily) in a retrospective interview. Yancey Martin is quite right when she says that practices are guided only sometimes by intention relative to gender (p. 355 [this issue]). That is to say, within a given practice, coexists with other determinants.