Patterns Of Authority Research Articles

Women, Leadership, and Mosque's Cultures: Indonesian Heritage in New York City

This paper examines the use of social, religious and cultural heritage for community building and mosque participation by Indonesian Muslim communities in New York City and its impact on women’s leadership in al-Hikmah mosque and their production of moral agency and pious self in the mosque setting. I argue that Indonesian Muslim women in AI-Hikmah mosque has more leadership capacity due to the cultural heritage of Indonesian Islam and the complementary status of women in their communities. In this paper, I will, first, discuss how the cultural heritage of a mosque along with its patriarchal, masculine leadership influences women's treatment. I will, secondly, examine how female authority is produced within the enmeshed patriarchal leadership, the heritage of Indonesian values. and masculine mosque cultures. In particular, I will discuss how women's religious and social activities generate empirical characters that shape the performance of female moral agency and the cultivation of the pious self. I will, finnally, analyze a pattern of female authority in the mosque and the way in which women construct their authority as leaders in the mosque. Throughout the paper, I draw parallels between female authority in AI-Hikmah mosque and the social and cultural practices in Indonesia.

Primjer metodološkog koncepta istraživanja neformalne moći u organizaciji rada

In this paper, the authors present a methodological concept of informal power research, on example of the possibility of its use in the organization of higher education. Gender equality means that women and men have equal opportunities, rights and obligations in their social, professional and family environment. Although it is often reduced to an equal distribution of paid and unpaid work, a broader concept includes many more indicators such as the political dimensions of gender and physical integrity of men and women. Some studies only stresses the dimension of equality, while the other focuses on the evaluation of the same gender roles and the transformation of existing practices, but most researchers in this field agree that gender equality has many different dimensions that can not be subsumed under a single one-dimensional indicator. Sociologists usually recognize gender inequality in unequal access of women and men to social resources, money, time, social division of labor and the labor market. In this paper we consider the faculties as an organization of higher education, ie. organization of work, as the area of human social organization in which different interests of individuals and groups condition relations of cooperation and conflict, and investigating whether the formal power that women have within the organization is limited or completely blocked by the informal power that originate from the traditional patterns of behavior and authority.

To Regain Some Kind of Human Equality: Theorizing the Political Productivity of ‘‘Crimes against Humanity’’

This article theorizes the politically productive aspects of the term ‘‘crimes against humanity’’ in contradistinction to normative political theories that conceive of international law as applied ethics and to Schmittian approaches to law as the medium of depoliticization. I argue that the criminal against humanity must be distinguished from the enemy of humanity, because crimes against humanity provide a universal yet minimal normative recognition to the offender within a global legal order. Analyzing the distinct patterns of agency and authority that arise from rights and crime respectively, I outline the communal dimension of the criminal law and discuss the performative claim to humanity as a global body politic that attends pronouncements of crimes against humanity by international authorities.

Authenticating Performances

Adherents of performance theory emphasise the constitutive and transformative potentia of rituals with respect to patterns of social organization and authority. For them, rituals “not only mean something, but also do something, particularly the way they construct and inscribe power relationships” (Bell 1997). This contribution focuses on the role of ritual in postcolonial identity constitution and the performative authentication of political power and social authority in Taiwan. Since the middle of the 1990s, traditionalist performances have been on the rise on the island. Generously subsidised by government bodies which have sought to demonstrate their nativist or multiculturalist orientations, aboriginal elites not only publicly worshipped ancestor gods and enacted animal sacrifices in so called “revitalised” public rituals, but also used these occasions to point to the primordial power of aborigines vis-à-vis their former colonisers, the Han Chinese. In many cases, however, the “revitalised” rituals described here conflicted with the interests of common people in aboriginal society, who wished public ritual to be compatible with their newly adopted Christian traditions. Taking a closer look at the contemporary rituals of the Taroko and Ami, which are characterised by the above mentioned dynamics, I argue that rituals publicly performed by aborigines today amalgamate different levels of meaning. While they articulate and negotiate the identity needs and social exigency of the respective social group or society (Turner 1969), they simultaneously carry those often elite-dominated mechanisms that are described by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) in their examinations of the processes of cultural invention for the needs of political and cultural entities, as well as by Paul Brass (1991) in his analyses of elite competition. In other words, while these rituals may in many cases have efficacy with regard to the constitution of society and identity, the traditionalist rituals in particular frequently serve the authentication exigencies of various elites. Finally, I suggest that if one wants to provide the culture of common people with greater opportunities for representation, one should not focus too much on the display of “authentic” old traditions in order to highlight Taiwanese subjectivity, but should also acknowledge those hybridised new traditions which aboriginal society has generated over the course of Taiwan’s more recent history and which may also contain new religious elements.

Muslim Women’s Rights Activists’ Visibility: Stretching the Gendered Boundaries of the Public Space in the City of Lucknow

Within the last decade, Muslim women’s rights activists in postcolonial India have acquired increasing visibility within the contested public space. This paper looks pointedly at the manner in which three ideologically different Muslim women’s rights activists work toward carving out women’s spaces within the men-dominated political and legal landscape in the city of Lucknow. In doing so, it examines first: how Muslim women’s activists carefully orchestrate their appearance within the public space, and second: their strategic utilisation of the media for the dissemination of their alternative proposals concerning the ‘true Islam’ and the ‘ideal Muslim woman.’ This paper argues that Muslim women’s rights activists’ interventions within the public space destabilise hegemonic patterns of knowledge and authority. Laying bare the possibilities Islamic discourse and its embodiment offer for women’s agency, this paper challenges liberal and modernist perspectives that view religion as being obstructive to women’s freedom and autonomy.

Liberating Teaching Democracy and Ways of Implementation

This article focuses on the undemocratic phenomenon still exiting in teaching with borrowed feminist liberation analysis model. With its illustration of liberating teaching democracy (LTD), this article defines LTD as a teaching principle of enhancing the knowledge understanding and ability of students. LTD would materialize the free development of human nature among teachers and students; liberate teachers and students’ consciousness and behavior through the teaching process; build teacher-student learning communities; respect every individual experience of community members; and unfold equal dialogues. This article analyzes LTD regarding teaching goal, methods, and teacher-student relationship. Above all, ways of implementing LTD are emphasized: setting up equal teaching authority pattern, promoting teacher-student goal of human nature, and materializing the transformation from given to liberation.

Democracy and differentiation in Europe

ABSTRACTThis contribution addresses two questions. First, what forms and shapes does European Union (EU) differentiation take in the realm of representative democracy in the multilevel constellation that makes up the EU? Second, what are the implications of differentiation for the theory and the practice of democracy? The question is whether citizens are capable of governing themselves in a political entity marked by patterns of authority and/or policy-making that vary in unprecedented ways along territorial and functional lines. Drawing on differentiation rather than the more commonly used term differentiated integration entails a somewhat different research focus and allows considering the democratic challenges of patterns of integration and disintegration actualized by the euro crisis. The contribution establishes a set of democratic standards and assesses the democratic implications of differentiation in the EU. Doing that requires paying explicit attention to the distinctive character of the multilevel EU's structure of democratic representation.

Political Mobility and Political Reproduction from Generation to Generation

The American creed stresses political equality and political involvement, but substantial political inequality still persists from one generation to the next. Despite the importance of political inequality, not enough is known about the mechanisms that reproduce it. Political socialization research has focused on the transmission of political attitudes and culture across generations, but it has paid scant attention to how family transfers of economic resources, human capital, and social capital reproduce and perpetuate unequal patterns of political involvement and political authority. This article argues that more attention should be paid to measuring the persistence of political identity, political participation, civic engagement, and political influence networks over time and across generations. Special attention should be devoted to learning more about how the passage of family resources (economic resources, human capital, social capital, and cultural capital) from parents to children reproduces political inequality and reduces the opportunity for political mobility. Current data sources fall far short of what is needed to answer these questions, but linking the proposed American Opportunity Study with public voting records and with the American National Election Studies would provide a rich and powerful dataset for studying them.

Data barns, ambient intelligence and cloud computing: the tacit epistemology and linguistic representation of Big Data

The explosion of data grows at a rate of roughly five trillion bits a second, giving rise to greater urgency in conceptualizing the infosphere (Floridi 2011) and understanding its implications for knowledge and public policy. Philosophers of technology and information technologists alike who wrestle with ontological and epistemological questions of digital information tend to emphasize, as Floridi does, information as our new ecosystem and human beings as interconnected informational organisms, inforgs at home in ambient intelligence. But the linguistic and conceptual representations of Big Data--the massive volume of both structured and unstructured data--and the real world practice of data-mining for patterns and meaningful interpretation of evidence reveal tension and ambiguity in the bold promise of data analytics. This paper explores the tacit epistemology of the rhetoric and representation of Big Data and suggests a richer account of its ambiguities and the paradox of its real world materiality. We argue that Big Data should be recognized as manifesting multiple and conflicting trajectories that reflect human intentionality and particular patterns of power and authority. Such patterns require attentive exploration and moral appraisal if we are to resist simplistic informationist ontologies of Big Data, and the subtle forms of control in the political ecology of Big Data that undermine its promise as transformational knowledge.

NGOs, Turnout, and the Left

This article is designed to examine the role non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in politics. Previous evidence suggests that NGOs mobilize communities to challenge existing patterns of authority or that they serve hand in glove with existing elites. We reconcile these two contradictory findings by identifying an important contextual feature that helps determine the extent NGOs mobilize or anesthetize. We argue that a community’s level of education influences not only whether people vote but how they vote. We employ a cross-sectional data set from Brazilian municipalities that allows us to estimate the relationship between NGOs, voting turnout, and electoral results. We find that although there is a significant statistical interaction between literacy and NGOs when explaining voting turnout, the effect is not substantively important. The interaction between literacy and NGOs is, however, an important consideration in determining how people vote: in communities with relatively low literacy rates, a robust NGO presence significantly increases the left’s electoral fortunes. Our findings imply the influence NGOs have on society is more political than social.

Social Network Analysis and the De Facto/De Jure Conundrum: Security Alliances and the Territorialization of State Authority in the Post-Cold War Great Lakes Region

This paper presents an alternative reading of the evolution of the territorialization of state authority and security alliances in Africa's Great Lakes Region from that provided by Radil and Flint (2013). Rather than a general transformation in the direction of more territorially centralized states, patterns of state authority have remained variegated in the post-Cold War era, with continuing fracturing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is argued that Radil and Flint's differing interpretation stems from an inappropriate application of social network analysis (SNA) to a context characterized by profound divergences between de facto and de jure phenomena and patchy data availability. These observations suggest scepticism regarding the extent to which SNA can help overcome the epistemological rifts that divide studies on the geography of politics.

African American and European American Mothers’ Limit Setting and Their 36-Month-Old Children’s Responses to Limits, Self-Concept, and Social Competence

Maternal limit-setting behaviors and patterns were observed and examined in relation to 36-month-old children’s capacities for self-regulation in 50 African American (AA) and 66 European American (EA) mother–child dyads. Children’s capacities for self-regulation were assessed through their self-concept, social competence, and observed responses to limits. Accounting for demographic risk and children’s gender, there were no ethnic differences in children’s self-regulation. In both ethnic groups, a maternal authoritative limit-setting pattern was associated with more optimal children’s self-concept and responses to limits. Maternal limit setting was associated with social competence in the EA sample, but not in the AA sample. Although further research is required to understand contributions to social competence in AA children, these data provide support for the benefits of authoritative (teaching-based) limit setting in both AA and EA mothers with 36-month-old children.

Crisis as opportunity: youth, social media and the renegotiation of power in Africa

This paper conceptualises ‘global financial crisis’ as primarily political and focuses on the way it impacts on the ability of youth to renegotiate their place and space with patterns of authority and control in Africa, using the instrumentality of new media. Three main arguments are made. First is that, even though the crisis occurred within the economy, non-economic causal factors were key triggers. Second, the intersection between youth protest, the pressures of a global system in crisis and the opportunities being provided by globalised social media has been critical not only to the deepening of resistance, but also to the ability of youth to appropriate the discourses and channel grievance. Third, youth appropriation of protest discourses surrounding the pressures of the recent global crisis has forced a renegotiation of patterns of authority and control and is deepening stability challenges in different ways. This paper concludes by examining how the state has responded to this emerging youth ability to not only demand but also impose discourses within the public space.

African affirmations: The religion of modernity and the modernity of religion

This article contrasts three broad traditions that organize competing patterns of authority, community, and cooperation in contemporary Africa: the Axial religions (Christianity and Islam); indigenous chieftaincy systems based around chief, lineage, and clan; and globalized modernity, represented primarily by NGOs and the global human rights agenda. The article argues that in many respects it is the Axial religions that are the most modernizing, as they directly counter the power of traditional kin obligations (and the overwhelming dangers of witchcraft), while the purportedly modern and secular NGOs practice a ritualized version of modernity, even as they are penetrated by the norms and practices of the kin-based chieftaincy system and its related system of patron–client ties.

Unrolling Egyptian mummies in nineteenth-century Britain

AbstractThe unrolling of Egyptian mummies was a popular spectacle in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. In hospitals, theatres, homes and learned institutions mummified bodies, brought from Egypt as souvenirs or curiosities, were opened and examined in front of rapt audiences. The scientific study of mummies emerged within the contexts of early nineteenth-century Egyptomania, particularly following the decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822, and the changing attitudes towards medicine, anatomy and the corpse that led to the 1832 Anatomy Act. The best-known mummy unroller of this period was the surgeon and antiquary Thomas Pettigrew, author of the highly respectedHistory of Egyptian Mummies. By examining the locations, audiences and formats of some of Pettigrew's unrollings this paper outlines a historical geography of mummy studies within the intellectual worlds of nineteenth-century Britain, illuminating the patterns of authority, respectability, place and performance that Pettigrew and his colleagues navigated with varying degrees of success.

Patterns of Authority and Governance in Rural China: who's in charge? Why?

A ‘dual-power structure’ governs the Chinese countryside. Branch committees of the Chinese Communist Party, traditionally the centers of power in the villages, increasingly share their authority with elected villagers' committees. Seeking to illuminate the factors contributing to the division of authority between these ‘two committees’, we view Party branch secretaries and the chairs of villagers' committees as the agents of two distinct principals. Party branch secretaries tend to derive their authority from township authorities, while villagers' committee chairs derive theirs from their village electorates. We predict that the division of authority between the two committees varies with (a) the relative levels of activism exhibited by the principals; and (b) the perceived legitimacy of the agents, as determined by their method of s/election. Through analysis of a unique dataset, we test four hypotheses derived from this framework. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the ‘exercise of power’ in rural China and shed light on the dynamics of China's political evolution.

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas

Exceptional Violence. Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012. xiv, 298 pp. $84.95 US (cloth). Post-independence discussions about Jamaica's violence range from esoteric examinations, domestic- and international-research reports and statistical rankings, to more sophisticated theorizing that attribute violence to a number of economic, social, and political factors. Using an anthropological lens, Deborah Thomas acknowledges traditional sociological and criminological explanations, but also challenges, expands, and locates the problem within the historical context of slavery with its practice of social exclusion, alienation, and inequalities. Thomas uses the discussion of violence to rethink the post-colony from the perspective of an earlier imperial moment, and by so doing, she interrogates particular forms of violence, that for her, foundational to the development and deployment of ideologies regarding (p. 3). For Thomas, two related themes are repeated: one examines and its relationship to history, violence, and practices of citizenship; the other explores culture and its relationship to representation, debates about the appropriateness and availability of representations, notions of who has the power to create representations, and the relationships between representation and economic development (p. 4). She situates violence within the colonial epoch. This systematic interrogation sets the context for understanding possession and perception of citizenship, its meaning, impact, representations, and power relations in the experience of violence. Current manifestations of violence in Jamaica have been observed in other post-colonial societies. Indeed, the discussion underscores how historic injustices are overlaid on contemporary Jamaican cultural and political practices and institutions, thereby replicating, in different forms, that which the colonial made dominant. The chapters are treated topically. The introduction, entitled Moving Bodies and subtitled Reluctant Witnessing articulates how violence pervades the psyche of government and citizens. Consequently, levels of interpersonal violence are symptomatic of historical trajectories of structural violence. The explication of Dead Bodies in Chapter one lays the groundwork for the understanding that patterns of authority in the political sphere are extensions of practices from colonial period (p. 7). Chapter two invokes the notion of Deviant Bodies to contextualize the effects of slavery on family formation, as well as provide the scaffolding for understanding culturalist notions of poverty and violence. The discussion of Spectacular Bodies in Chapter three dismisses the attribution of violence in Jamaica to the influence of American media, suggesting instead that such interpretation obscures earlier histories of imperialista and slavery, and specifically the transnational organization of violence. Instead, spectacular forms of punishment and discipline during slavery better account for the more performative dimensions of current killings. Public Bodies, in Chapter Four, juxtaposed narratives and counter-narratives about the emancipation statute--Redemption Song--to explore the crisis. This discussion deconstructs the superimpositions of norms related to gender, sexuality, and family, and thereby underscores how these control mechanisms serve as a foundation for respectability. The most poignant articulation of interrupted citizenship is outlined in Chapter five. …

‘Can't cook, won't cook’: men's involvement in cooking when their wives develop dementia

The division of household labour in heterosexual couples continues to be unequal, indicating that gender inequality persists in the domestic sphere. Yet, although there is a lack of gender equity in housework, this is less clear-cut in terms of cooking. This paper explores whether men are willing to cook when their wives develop dementia. The paper presents findings from a qualitative study in England (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)), which explored the everyday decisions made by married couples when one partner had dementia. The author examines the division of labour within the couples and identifies whether women exercised choice and control over who did the cooking. Although research into dementia usually focuses on the social competence of people with dementia (as determined by their carers), this study explored the domestic competence of both spouses, particularly husbands who were carers. It was found that men are often unable or unwilling to cook when their wives develop dementia or, alternatively, they take over cooking altogether, thereby excluding their wives from a task they enjoy. Gendered patterns of authority or control were apparent in the couples' decision-making dynamics, indicating that gender inequality in relationships persists even when women develop dementia.

Introduction: Curiosities of Middle East Studies in Queer Times

Starting in 2010, movements of transformation, spaces of sociability, relations of power, and economies of affect in the Middle East plunged into a time of radical dislocation. Fearless, dissident solidarities challenged patterns of identity, normativity, and authority that had constituted the region for more than a generation. One epoch ended, in which struggles over power seemed all too often restricted to constrained contests between nongovernmental organizations, religious dissidents, and security-state repressors. In their place new insurgencies came to question the narratives, binaries, and regimes of feeling pinned to “identity politics” as defined by categories of class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Curious forms of revolutionary social uprising exploded among gender, labor, and community dissidents at street level, generating novel popular cultures, rebel counterpublics, and carnivals of new-media experimentation.

Effects of Democratic and Authoritative Discourse Patterns on Students’ Achievement in Biology in MUBI Educational Zone Of Adamawa State

Effects of Democratic and Authoritative Discourse Patterns on Students’ Achievement in Biology in MUBI Educational Zone Of Adamawa State