Liberal Capitalist Societies Research Articles

Title IX: Forced to Wrestle up the Backside

Many doors of opportunity in educational endeavors opened for women following passage of Title IX (1). In 1971, year before enactment of law, women earned only one percent of dental degrees, nine percent of medical degrees and seven percent of law degrees. By 2000 number of women completing these professional programs grew to 40 percent of dental degrees, 43 percent of medical degrees, 46 percent of law degrees. Moreover, 44 percent of doctoral degrees went to women in year 2000, up from 14 percent in 1971 (Digest of Education Statistics, 2001). (2) Yet these impressive educational gains for women have not been focus of public attention regarding Title IX. Rather, impact of Title IX on scholastic athletics has dominated public discourse since passage of law. More specifically, women's success in education has met with a conservative backlash (3) focusing on Title IX and division of resources within collegiate athletics. Whereas Title IX became law thirty years ago, issue of Title IX compliance in athletics remains as hotly contested today as it was in 1972. Most recently, debate has been framed as an either/or division of resources between men's 'minor' (4) sports and women's athletics with Title IX as crux of argument. According to those who view Title IX as a threat to men's minor sports, rise in participation numbers in women's sport not only correlates to a decrease in men's 'minor' sport participation numbers, but is also cause of that decrease. In response, women's sport advocates argue that relationship between men's minor sport and women's sport is a spurious one with confounding factor being development of a big business sport model within collegiate programs. This model is reflected in escalating costs of men's football and basketball along with an 'arms' race for bigger and more elaborate facilities. skewed spending within athletic departments has not only contributed to decreases in opportunities in men's minor sport, but is also reason that women continue to receive less than their full share of athletic pie. In relation to wrestling, issue of Title IX has become more complicated in last decade, as women's grappling participation has grown. focus of this paper is a critical analysis of publicly mediated debates over issues surrounding Title IX and athletics with an attempt to understand cultural climate and far-reaching consequences for women. In this analysis, I examine public discourse surrounding Title IX and wrestling from 1972 through 2002. Sources include daily newspapers, Sports Illustrated, wrestling periodicals, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Using a critical cultural studies approach, I read media representations with an eye to deconstructing underlying intersecting lines of power relationships within broader social context. These mediated debates carry significance far beyond determining allocations of resources between men and women within athletic departments. Ultimately results and tone of debate have potential to bring changes to law that will carry far-reaching effects for gender relations starting with education and extending into professional realms women have accessed through increased opportunities in education. While mediated debates over Title IX may not dictate what people think, they do have power to determine what they think about. To put it simply: mass media have become core systems for distribution of ideology (Gitlin, 1980, p. 2). processed image, Title IX in this case, becomes the thing for a public that has few alternative sources of information, or none at all, for a perspective outside mainstream media. The media--at least in liberal capitalist society--take account of certain popular currents and pressures, symbolically incorporating them, repackaging and distributing them throughout society (Gitlin, 1980, p. …

DYNAMICS OF RESURRECTION IN THE CHURCH'S TRADITION AND MISSION

Self-regulation of the Orthodox ecciesiology As the majority of the Orthodox churches live in the eastern part of Europe and Russia, in the geographical area of the ex-communist countries, it is necessary that in any description of Orthodoxy the experiences of these churches should be taken into account. The meaning of their experience, in the midst of heavy restrictions and persecutions, remains to be explored and articulated. The end of the cold war, the reunification of the old continent, and the confrontation with a new liberal capitalist society raised new issues. The churches today look for new orientations and programmes in order to meet the challenge of a hybrid post-communist society. Nobody is in a position to propose a synthesis of the post-communist heritage. The fact is that historians did not pay serious attention to it. Even the church authorities do not know how to situate the temptations and weaknesses they suffered and resisted during recent decades. Several conservative positions taken recently by church authorities (on moral and sexu al issues, place and ministry of women, ecumenism) are formulated as if nothing has happened in the evolution of the life and mission of the churches. They try to say that the institutional image of the church as such remained untouched, thus giving a false description of human and historical realities in the post-communist counties. However, the hermeneutical value of this experience is not lost. Many are the voices, inside and outside the church, who say that the Orthodox cannot continue to operate with an old ecclesiological model, if the realities of the world in which they now live are accepted and evaluated, and especially if they want to prepare the people for a new era of evangelization (in their countries and in Europe) and for the new millennium. The point in this critique is to avoid any generalizations or abstractions about present history and the image of Orthodoxy. A lot of new orientations, projects and reforms are taking place, but without being conceived in a coherent way, and as an integral part of a new fundamental understanding of the church. The traditional profile of the church at the end of a long period of tribulations cannot remain beyond question and criticism. As a matter of illustration, I will indicate several areas where some methodological change should take place. Many Orthodox still accept an ecclesiology which makes a sharp distinction between the sinfulness of the individual members of the church, i.e. the faithful who are in need of forgiveness of sins and renewal, and the Church itself, with a capital 'C', which is the body of Christ, holy by her nature, infallible in her doctrinal and moral teachings (ecclesia non potest errare), and the historical manifestation of the coming reign of God (the doctrine on holy/sinful church is at the centre of Reformation-Catholicism confrontation). There are quasi-magical understandings of apostolic succession and of Tradition, with a capital 'T', conceived as sacred entities overflowing from generation to generation. The vocation of the church is to preserve and defend the binding doctrines, and official interpretations and communications of the tradition. The recent experience of the people is rarely theologically and hermeneutically evaluated. Many Orthodox have also an understanding of the efficaciousness of the sacraments that reflects scholastic thinking, i.e. the effect depends on the sacraments being celebrated (ex opere operato), and not on the worthiness of the celebrant and/or recipient. The purpose of this presentation is not to open a debate about a traditional ecclesiology with its component elements, but to name a problem, i.e. to take seriously the credibility of a church institution without by-passing or ignoring the actual history of the people. The recent experience of the Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe confirms some of the grounds of our ecclesiology, but it also challenges several of its claims: We, Orthodox must be ready to be questioned and challenged concerning our claims. …

The Fiscal State, the Market, and the Individual Moral Capacity in the Secularized Society

This essay is an attempt to construct a philosophically correct relationship between economics and ethics, by contrasting it with the philosophically wrong conventional wisdom, and based on objective notions of the common good social justice, and to draw some implications concerning the role of morality in the working of the political economy of the fiscal state and of the market in contemporary liberal capitalist and secularized societies. The basic claim identifies individual moral capacity in the individual's possession of moral values defined as principles giving an absolute meaning to human life, and identifies furthermore the only absolute meaning of human life compatible with the secular-scientific worldview, intrinsically devoid of any such meaning, in individual liberty-independence defined as the personal experience of selfconsciousness. The secularization of Western culture has displaced non-secular values without replacing them, making liberal capitalist societies into societies without values. The individual's awareness of individual liberty-independence as the only public moral value is a necessary condition for ensuring the safeguarding of this unique secular ethical principle in the working of the political economy and liberal political institutions of secularized societies. If this individual moral capacity is shared by too few people, or too weak, then no system of rules, and of management of government power and market forces, however perfect, will ever suffice for the purpose.

Daubing the drudges of fury

A substantial body of empirical work suggests that young, economically marginalized males are the most likely perpetrators and victims of serious physical violence. Interpreting these findings in a historicized way that has been neglected by the criminological discourses of the moment suggests that physical violence has become an increasingly unsuccessful strategy in the quest for social power in liberal-capitalist societies. Although it has been displaced by symbolic violence as the principal domineering force in capitalism’s historical project, physical violence has not been genuinely discouraged but harnessed as a specialist practice in a pseudo-pacification process. From this perspective, violence has a complex relationship with liberal-capitalism. Can the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ help criminology to deal with this complexity and inform violence reduction strategies? This article argues that, in the context of pseudo-pacification, the notion that violent males ‘rework the themes’ of an institutionally powerful ‘hegemonic masculinity’ inverts and distorts the concept of hegemony, which for Gramsci was the self-affirming cultural production of the dominant political-economic class. Thus the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ tends to downplay political economy and class power, which suggests that it is too far removed from historical processes and material contexts to either justify the use of the term hegemony itself or explain the striking social patterns of male violence. This intellectual retreat is representative of a general political evacuation of capitalism’s global socioeconomic processes, a move that is allowing sparsely regulated market forces to continue the economic insecurity, specialist roles and corresponding cultural forms that reproduce the traditional male propensity to physical violence.

New Public Management and Substantive Democracy

The authors are concerned that a remaining refuge of substantive democracy in America, the public sector, is in danger of abandoning it in favor of the market model of management. They argue that contemporary American democracy is confined to a shrunken procedural remnant of its earlier substantive form. The classical republican model of citizen involvement faded with the rise of liberal capitalist society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Capitalism and democracy coexist in a society emphasizing procedural protection of individual liberties rather than substantive questions of individual development. Today's market model of government in the form of New Public Management goes beyond earlier “reforms,” threatening to eliminate democracy as a guiding principle in public‐sector management. The authors discuss the usefulness of a collaborative model of administrative practice in preserving the value of democracy in public administration.

Subjecthood and Self-Determination: The Limitations of Postmodernism as Democratic Theory

The history of Western liberal capitalist society, viewed from the perspective of the growth of democracy, is contradictory. Although the idea of negative liberty at the basis of democracies of the liberal type secured citizens against arbitrary encroachments from the state, at the same time, by securing the rights of property first and foremost, it exposed those same citizens to the more insidious and all-determining undemocratic forces of the capitalist market. The history of liberal democracy thus created the conditions for the flourishing of genuine individuality in a democratic polity at the same time as it undermined those conditions by subjecting all need fulfillment (through which individuality is developed) to market forces. Until the fragmentation of radical movements occasioned by the upheavals of the 1960s, radical theory and practice was minimally unified around the critique of the contradiction between democracy and market forces at the core of liberal society. The fundamental principle of this critique stated that democratic society could flourish if and only if need satisfaction was freed from its subordination to money demand.

Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique since Independence

Confronting Leviathan describes Mozambique's attempt to construct a socialist society in one African country on the back of an anti-colonial struggle for national independence. In explaining the failure of this effort the authors suggest reasons why the socialist vision of the ruling party, Frelimo, lacked resonance with Mozambican society. They also document in detail South Africa's attempts to destabilize the country, even to the extent of sponsoring the Renamo insurgents. The dynamics of that insurgency and its roots in Mozambican society are examined as well as the process of negotiation that brought it to a close. Finally the authors analyze the more recent attempt to construct a liberal capitalist society in Mozambique. From their findings it appears that this may prove no easier than the construction of socialism.

Schumpeter, the New Deal, and Democracy

Joseph Schumpeter is known to American political scientists as the originator of an elite conception of democracy as a political “method,” a conception found in hisCapitalism, Socialism and Democracy(1942). But I show in this paper that in Schumpeter's study of the development of liberal capitalist societies, he also treated democracy as a socially transformative historical tendency, one of several that he thought were propelling such societies toward a form of “democratic” socialism. Schumpeter regarded the politics of labor and the reorientation of state policy in the New Deal era as evidence of these tendencies—especially of a tendency toward the democratic reconstruction of workplace hierarchy, which he deplored. In his later work, Schumpeter sketched the outlines of a “democratic” socialist society in which the most harmful of these tendencies, in his estimation, would be curbed.

The Social Market Economy

The collapse of Communism in the regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has brought forth a plethora of alternative political and economic models for the reorganization of those societies. The vacuum that has been left could be regarded as an ideal laboratory for the testing of competing theories, and the temptations to experiment with the more benign forms of constructivist rationalism are likely to prove irresistible. If liberal capitalism is to be successfully created, it will clearly not have the same biography as it has had in the Western European and Anglo-American countries, where its emergence was the result of slow evolution: often its appearance and survival were due to a quite fortuitous combination of circumstances. In those countries it was not the result of any deliberate democratic choice but the outcome of a happy confluence of traditional rules and customary practices, and the participants in them had little idea of the form of the system that they were creating. Indeed, ideological sanctification was almost an afterthought, and democratic approval was belated and in most cases not enthusiastic. Britain was a liberal capitalist society, and possessed the necessary body of private law, some time before the franchise was significantly democratized (which did not occur until 1867). It is, of course, recent theoretical and empirical research which has revealed that the political choice mechanisms that developed haphazardly after the success of the market are a potential threat to it.

American Professors in the Progressive Era: Incomes, Aspirations, and Professionalism

American Professors in the Progressive Era: Incomes, Aspirations, and Professionalism In all that has been written about the professions, little has been done to analyze the social and economic history of individual professions or to test the linkages between professionalization and material success. On the contrary, Greenwood argued that professionals perform services primarily for psychic satisfaction and only secondarily for monetary compensation. Self-seeking motives feature only minimally in the choice of the profession. ... Wiebe echoed the anti-materialist conception, claiming that the new professionals in the progressive era lost that [once common] appreciation for fine gradations of wealth and its display.... Careful comparisons of income were replaced by vaguer concerns about the moral and social implications of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. In this way, Greenwood and Wiebe continued a tradition which set the motives of professionals against those of liberal capitalist society.1 But social science and common sense supported an alternative view. It was always unrealistic to assume that professionals, even academics, were free of concerns about money; income and con-

Native Hunting and the Migratory Birds Convention Act: Historical, Political and Ideological Perspectives

In the last twenty years restriction of native hunting of migratory birds under international wildlife law has been a source of conflict between the Canadian government and native peoples. It has been assumed by jurists, scholars and native groups that key provisions of the Migratory Bird Treaty and the Migratory Birds Convention Act (1918) were not intended to apply to native hunters when originally drafted—that violations of aboriginal and treaty hunting rights were simply overlooked by policymakers during the negotiation and legislative drafting process. This article reassesses the intentions, attitudes and motives of Canadian and American wildlife conservation policy-makers with respect to native hunting and wildlife destruction. First, the political history of the Migratory Bird Treaty is outlined, the roles played by American special-interest groups and Canadian policy-makers are defined, and the treaty negotiations are scrutinized for evidence of ‘intent.’ Second, attitudes toward native hunting and wildlife destruction held by the elite group of Canadian civil servants that lobbied for and negotiated the Treaty and drafted the Act are evaluated to clarify ‘intent’ further. Third, administrative and legislative precedents for restricting native hunting in Canada are identified and the perceptions of native hunting that underwrote them are defined. Finally, the question of ‘intent’ is explored by evaluating wildlife conservationists’ perception of native hunting against their ideology of wildlife conservation—an ideology which primarily served the economic interests and psychological needs of men in industrialized liberal-capitalist society.

Racial and Ethnic Inequality

This study tests the hypothesis that socialist systems have provided significantly greater political and economic equality for their ethnic and racial minorities than have liberal-capitalist societies. The method used herein is a comparison of the relative status of, and changes over time in the status of, minority groups in four socialist states (the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia), with the same attributes of approximately similar groups in capitalist societies. Comparisons are made with respect to the distribution of political power, income, education, and health care. The hypothesis is not supported. Instead, the relative status of minorities is remarkably similar in both socialist and capitalist societies. The validity of this finding is tested against the experience of the more recent Chinese and Cuban revolutions, which thus far have been no more successful in eradicating inegalitarianism along ethnic lines. Sources of these persisting cleavages in socialist societies are considered in conclusion. It is suggested that, in addition to structural constraints, socialist elites have not given high priority to policies aimed at reducing racial and ethnic inequalities.

Industrial Democracy Under Liberal Capitalism: A Comparison of Trends in Australia, France and the USA

An examination is made of the trends toward new forms of industrial democracy in three liberal capitalist societies: France, the United States and Australia. A three-dimensional framework is introduced which uses the ideology of the labour movement, the degree of control which is sought by employees at the enterprise level and the level at which participation occurs, to compare developments in each country. It is argued that a convergence of approaches is occurring in these countries towards the participatory enterprise, albeit with some variations, within the framework of liberal capitalism.

Document pour l'histoire du présent : un essai significatif sur « la crise » (1970-1975) (Note critique)

Les sociétés industrielles évoluées sont entrées, vers 1970, sur toute la planète, dans une période dénommée « crise » (bien qu'elle ne soit pas assimilable à celle dont le début fut marqué par la panique du 24 octobre 1929 à Wall Street) : zone de turbulence, d'incertitude et même sorte de dépression morale à l'égard de la valeur des sciences et des techniques appliquées aux institutions sociales et au bien-être individuel. Ces symptômes de « crise du progrès » ont été aggravés, à partir d'octobre 1973, par la « guerre du Kippour », immédiatement suivie de l'augmentation du prix du pétrole et des principales matières premières.

A Reform Mentality: Federal Policy Toward Black Marylanders, 1864-1868

A REFORM MENTALITY: Federal Policy Toward Black Marylanders, 1864-1868 Richard Paul Fuke In recent years, such scholars as C. Vann Woodward, George M. Fredrickson, William McFeeley and Louis S. Gerteis have suggested that federal support for black Americans in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction period fell far short of what was required for significant social and economic change; that officials of the United States Army and the Freedmen's Bureau were more concerned with maintaining the Southern racial and economic status quo than with effecting meaningful reforms. As Gerteis writes: "Whatever changes might have occurred as a result of the war, federal authorities took care to see that they would not be revolutionary. . . . Emancipation did not involve specific changes in either the status of the former slaves or in the conditions under which they labored."1 The findings of Gerteis and others of a like mind contribute to a fresh understanding of an historically and historiographically troubled period. From them we leam that the Northern racism so effectively described in Leon Litwack's North of Sfovery remained pervasive during the Civil War and Reconstruction years and undermined any prospect of racial realignment in the South.2 We learn too that limitations in Northern economic thinking were equally damaging. A liberal-capitalist society with a strong attachment to private property could hardly countenance a legislative redistribution of Southern wealth. The phrase "forty acres and a mule" might make effective propaganda, but it was never a real possibility.3 1 Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks, 1861-1865 (Westport, Conn., 1973), p. 5. See also C. Vann Woodward, "Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy," in Harold M. Hyman (ed.), New Frontiers of the American Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), pp. 125-147; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on AfroAmerican Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), pp. 165-197; William McFeeley, Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven, 1968). 2 Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961). See also Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Skvery (Urbana, 1967); Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968). 3 Fredrickson, Black Image, pp. 194-197. 214 Once this is said, however, it is dangerous to accept these new arguments without careful definition. In their new concentration on Northern deficiency, Gerteis and others tend to ignore positive aspects of government policy and forget that despite their economic and racial conservatism, many federal officials were avowed reformers who thought they were changing the lives of newlyfreed blacks. Although at no point did these men suggest a radical transformation of the Southern society and economy, their behavior did not preclude the presence of a reform mentality. The existence of such a mentality is significant. That these men failed to bring about a social and economic revolution is undeniable . That their limitations contributed to this failure is also beyond question. But that they disavowed a new status for black Americans is simply not true. Gerteis states that "Federal policy toward Southern blacks . . . pursued two major obectives: the mobilization of black laborers and soldiers [against planter interests ] and the prevention of violent change."4 Perhaps so, but this indictment is too simple and one-sided. By concentrating on the negative aspects of federal policy, Gerteis tells us only a part of the story. And even if we accept his general description of federal officials, the latters' shortcomings and failures must still be judged according to every available standard including that of their qwn positive concepts of change. A thorough examination of these concepts and their relationship to practical results would require much more than a study of a single state. Nevertheless, such an approach has its merits. Circumstances in Maryland were such that the immediate pre- and post-emancipation period provides an excellent opportunity to observe federal officials at work. Both the United States Army and the Freedmen's Bureau played an active role in Maryland during the Civil War and Reconstruction years...

Reformist Themes in the Canadian Labour Congress

Among the studies that have been done on the working class in industrialized liberal capitalist societies, one finding remains consistent. It is that while manual workers may not be committed to the predominant values of capitalism, it does not necessarily follow that they embrace an opposing ideology (Nordlinger, 1967; McKenzie and Silver, 1968; Goldthorpe et al., 1968; Kornhauser, 1965; Richter, 1973; Mann, 1970,1973). In his comprehensive review of the research in Great Britain and the United States, Michael Mann concludes that there are two types of values widely endorsed by the working class: (a) values expressed in concrete terms corresponding to everday reality, and (b) vague simplistic divisions of the social world into rich and poor. There is, he claims, no real political philosophy uniting these themes (1970:436). Maurice Pinard (1971:95), in his study of voting behaviour in Quebec, extends this phenomenon further when he states that

Class, Status, Party and Education

progenitor-the Christian Church-education insists on a degree of purity which it is always prevented from wholly realizing both by hostile and powerful forces without and by the inadequacies of those charged with tending the ideal within. But despite these chronic problems the failure is never total; the impossible ideal remains a criterion for judgment, a standard to which behaviour makes periodic attempts to conform, and a value to which even many of the external enemies pay at least formal respect. The ideal is that education, and the inseparable activities of scholarship and the advancement of knowledge, should be governed solely by their own internal laws. The truth should be pursued wherever it leads and regardless of whom it offends; the success or failure of both pupils and teachers should be judged solely by the internal criteria of the process of study itself and not by external factors of rank, wealth or power; decisions as to what to teach or where to research should be determined by the emergent needs of the subjects as they are defined and ranked by the academic community alone-that community itself being defined solely by educational and scholarly criteria.1 The reasons why this claim is an impossible one are not hard to find. The acquisition and pursuit of knowledges are valuable resources which can be of use in a wide variety of ways outside the educational community itself, being aids to power and the achievement of a wide range of material goals. There are therefore many groups in any society who will want to lay their hands on education and turn it to their own advantage, threatening the vaunted autonomy. Against this education has few material defences. Indeed, in order to find some institutional embodiment it has to draw on extra-educational resources, with the result that its very defences are constructed with the weapons of potential enemies. Although our predominant concern here is with one form of 'invasion'-that from the political-it would be highly misleading to abstract politics from the wider context of social powers which surround education. Absence of political involvement alone by no means guarantees the claimed autonomy, and may in fact only lead educational institutions into an intensified dependence on alternative social forces. It is a feature of liberal capitalist societies that the state, while being invested with enormous power, is also scrutinized for its exercise of that power in a manner which is escaped by many other, particularly economic, institutions. The deeds of the state are widely publicized and its acquisition and use of specific powers are subject to elaborate procedural control. As a form of power the state is uniquely visible. Indeed, in much discussion, power is presented as something which by definition resides in the political sphere alone. In order to avoid such misconceptions, this examination of the relationship between education and politics will be prefaced by a general if cursory review of education in the