Power Hierarchies Research Articles

Identities, power and policing of young men in Mathare and Kaptembwo

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to our understanding of how identities are exploited and the impact on policing. Through empirical data from Mathare and Kaptembwo informal settlements, I analyse how economic status, gender, and age overlap to shape and construct young men experiences with policing. To do this, I locate social categories and identities within a broader social framing that attends to power, generational hierarchy and context. Further, I interrogate the interconnections between multiple formations of oppression related to crime, criminal justice, and conceptualisations of deviance. I take a holistic approach to analysing and thinking through how authority, domination, and power coalesce in lived human experiences. To comprehend how young men legitimised and resisted different forms of control and regulation imposed by the elders, police and Community Policing Committee, I argue that identities are sites of power struggles. They reconfigure power and relationships, affecting mentalities in policing. Understanding this helps us make sense of the experiences of young men living at the intersections of social identities, illuminate the systems that maintain power hierarchies and inform interactions with the different policing actors.

Putting on an act: learning service behaviour in young women’s vocational education and training for hospitality work

ABSTRACT Young people training for work in the hospitality industry learn that the occupation involves taking on a role in order to handle the emotional demands of guests. This article, based on Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour, focuses on young women’s experiences in the Swedish vocational education and training for the hospitality industry. The aim of the study is to analyse and critically examine ideas about good service such as putting on an act and how this role-play is shaped by gender. The data are derived from focus group interviews with 52 young women in hospitality training programmes. In these programmes, service behaviour ideas about what constitutes good service in terms of subordination, femininity and heterosexuality are normalised. The young women do not unreflectively absorb the conditions that service work entails. However, the education gives them little opportunity to gain knowledge about societal gender order and the possibility of understanding their life with that insight. One conclusion is that service behaviour in the form of putting on an act that students learn in vocational education and training is problematic, as it reinforces power hierarchies and leaves young women to single-handedly manage problems that arise in service work.

Family, politics and media

Abstract In this paper, we utilise the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus to examine reporting surrounding William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, a key point in the democratization of British politics where a politician not only communicated with ordinary people through hustings but indirectly to a wider electorate via media reporting of those hustings. With the use of social actor analysis (van Leeuwen 2008), approached through collocation, we find that a distinctive feature of media reporting was a focus on Gladstone’s family. This surprising intersection of family and electioneering reveals a powerful hierarchy of social relationships in terms of gender and seniority, which became an effective propaganda strategy as Gladstone, enabled by Liberal-supporting newspapers, utilised his family as a political tool.

A Critical Appreciation of the Commercial Blockbusters by Zhang Yimou

It is essential to note that for the past two decades the majority of the Fifth Generation directors have experienced an obvious shift of film-making from art cinema to the production of commercial blockbusters. By means of borrowing Hollywood’s “high concept” cinema, the local blockbusters featuring Chinese cultural elements are very emphatic about symbolism and visual effects of productions that are bringing to the audience new and stirring feel. And in the blockbusters of Chinese style, the stardom and renowned directors are the guaranteed success of box office. In terms of thematic subjects, the representative director Zhang Yimou has with certainty showcased his reflections on the unlimited power hierarchy and the impulse to deconstruct it in his works, which contain social and cultural allegories and morality problems of family. The so-called “commercial blockbusters” as <i>Hero</i> and <i>House of Flying Daggers</i> have utilized the unique on-site shooting and color effects to achieve the desired results. At the same time Zhang Yimou has in his art house works benefited from Akira Kurosawa, master of the genre, and some technicalities in gangster film. Zhang’s blockbusters of swordsman and Wuxia (martial art) have made an immense box value owing to their tactic violation of the mainstream ideologies. As a result, they are not regularly categorized as the most significant movie of the day. Being Zhang’s last blockbuster, <i>Curse of the Golden Flower </i>takes advantage of merging spectacular scenes and artificial staging for the purpose of authentic representation and imagination. This is also materialized by his cleverly adapting the original work of fame by Cao Yu, a contemporary playwright. Zhang Yimou’s blockbusters, with his special aesthetic, has largely succeeded in an economic sense, but failed ideologically to merge in the mainstream cinema of China.

Women of Influence: interdisciplinary participatory approaches to understanding female leadership in the Peruvian Amazon

The Mujeres que influyen (Women of Influence) project is a collaboration between researchers at University of East Anglia and PUCP, and young women from the Junín area of Peru who are members of the National Council of Indigenous Women of Peru. It takes its starting point from an acknowledgement that although women play a fundamental role in the preservation of biodiversity and ancestral knowledge, these contributions often go unrecognized and underdeveloped (Ketty Marcelo, 2018), to the detriment of the very culture and environment that should be preserved. Our women-led participatory project, uses film (production, screening, analysis) to highlight the potential and importance for active and organised participation by these young women in their communities in order to protect and nurture their natural resources. Working alongside Asháninka and Yanesha young women, we seek to demonstrate the value of young female involvement in community decision-making, addressing the cultural and societal inequalities that may disrupt their path to leadership and influence. In this paper, we focus on the methods developed in the project, particularly the value of participatory video production as a form of activism, with the outputs serving as creative manifestos in themselves. The co-designed activities have led us to reframe fieldwork as auto-ethnographic digital collaborations that have sought to disrupt power hierarchies and facilitate the co-production of new knowledge. We reflect on how our Indigenous partners have helped us rethink issues of sustainability, resilience and alternative strategies to respond to gender dynamics, political ecologies and environmental challenges.

MANAGERIAL ENTRENCHMENT: SCALE VALIDATION

Objective: This work focused on the influence of managerial entrenchment on investment decisions. The objective was to understand the main characteristics of this variable in order to develop an instrument that could measure it.. Theoretical Framework: The decision-making process in finance is influenced by several factors related to the decision maker, such as their psychological and cognitive biases, their risk tolerance, and even their intentions to entrench themselves in the management of a company. Behavioral finance began to address the complexity of the decision-making process, starting from the complexity of the individual themself, displacing the idea of the pragmatic decision of Homo economicus that traditional theory represented Method: A questionnaire was developed and applied to a sample of 154 managers. Then, the instrument was subjected to an exploratory factor analysis and a reliability test. Results and Discussion: The findings of this research pointed to three components for measuring managerial entrenchment. These components were called “Managers’ Decision Autonomy”, “Power Hierarchies” and “Freedom of action” in the use of the organization’s financial resources. As a result, the instrument was validated, which was found to be capable of measuring entrenchment with consistent reliability. Research Implications: The practical and theoretical implications of this research are discussed, providing insights into how the results can be applied or measured management entrenchment practices in investment decision-making. Originality/Value: Thus, this qualitative study contributes both to the finance literature by summarizing the main characteristics of managerial entrenchment and to behavioral finance studies by providing a validation instrument for one of its main subjects of study.

What Do News Editorials Point to in the Framing of Nigerian National Security? Does Media Content Project Public Lens or Elites Power Hierarchies?

Growing cases of the role of media in national security tend to suggest that news is reflective of on the spot assessment. Yet, a corpus of literature shows that media influence is highly dominated by elites’ power, where media framing projects more of these power and influence. This paper therefore expounds on the extent to which news media editorials are reflective of public concerns or portray more of elites’ power. Succinctly, the aim is to explore what media editorials point to in the framing of national security issues. In view of the precarity of insecurity and mounting challenges of Nigeria’s national security, it is pertinent to unravel what constantly preoccupies media establishments, mostly, their editorial contents. And what trajectory and path do they tilt towards in the broader mediatization of the nation’s national issues occasioned by terrorism, militancy, banditry, kidnapping and other crimes. Overall, the paper provides a clue about how news editorials showcase and often pander to hierarchal power within Nigeria’s national security architecture.

Probing the humanitarian securitisation approach to great-power wars: from Bush’s ‘war on terror’ to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT How do great-power leaders instrumentalise humanitarianism in sustaining the institutional and public mandate demanded by their war agendas? We examine the ‘humanitarian securitisation’ approach adopted by powerful state leaders as the domestic credibility and popularity of their war efforts become increasingly more difficult to guarantee over time. We define humanitarian securitisation as a discursive-hermeneutic process through which powerful initiator states frame the humanitarian crises arising from the terrorism and internal conflicts confronting less powerful target states as existential threats to the former’s own survival to bolster and justify their agendas further. Using Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and Putin’s Ukraine invasion as empirical cases, we argue that the humanitarian securitisation resulting from the artificial insertion of humanitarianism into the securitisation process becomes a double-edged sword that reinforces the legitimising and mobilising powers required by great-power leaders to pursue their narrow self-interests, but at the risk of being entangled into long drawn-out wars that damage genuine humanitarian efforts. In framing these ‘extraterritorial’ humanitarian crises as collective borderless existential threats that all parties affected must decisively defeat, this ad hoc and predatory process of humanitarian securitisation alters the form and substance of contemporary humanitarianism in a way that ultimately exacerbates existing power hierarchies.

#CannesYouNot? Oppositional and asymmetrical versions of believability in the Depp/Heard case

Johnny Depp’s contentious return to the red carpet at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival sparked fervent debate online about domestic abuse, believability, #MeToo and the rehabilitation of men accused of abuse. In this article, we analyse two oppositional hashtags that became central to this discussion on Twitter: #CannesYouNot, created by supporters of Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard; and #YesYouCannes, the response offered by Depp’s supporters. Drawing on a dataset of 18,000 tweets, we combine a network analysis with a qualitative analysis of the top tweets using each hashtag in order to understand how the hashtags circulated, their affective orientations and the evidence they use to support their positions. Our findings show that networked media allow the (re)construction of existing hierarchies of power; thus, we argue that although these appear to be straightforwardly oppositional hashtags, they operate asymmetrically in ways that have implications for our understandings of issue publics as well as ramifications for feminist digital activism.

Enhancing equity in arts-based research engagement: Methodological considerations from a policy-oriented community-development study

ABSTRACT This paper provides reflexive account of an arts-based communication tool used for a community development project in Manitoba, Canada. Drawing upon an intersectional perspective of social, health, and environmental inequalities, the multi-phase engagement involved citizens (n = 17; n = 9) as well as global policymakers (n = 6) in healthy cities, age-friendly cities, and sustainable city policy arenas. A visual graphic was employed to foster bidirectional dialogue between concerned local residents and global policymakers, forming the backbone of a community engagement strategy. Reflective analysis demonstrates how art can be mobilized toward reducing inequalities while notable challenges remain—including omission of highly-sidelined perspectives amidst complex interdisciplinarity; potential reductionism leading to manufactured consent; and considerations of communities inherently excluded in a qualitative, arts-based community engagement. The impacts of art on power hierarchies, emotion, project efficiency, and privilege are reviewed, with the objective of supporting more inclusive arts-based communications in future research.

Food insecurity and women's mental health in the Chitwan Valley of Nepal

Food insecurity is a major threat to global public health and sustainable development. As of 2022, 2.4 billion people worldwide experienced moderate to severe food insecurity. The occurrence and severity of food insecurity can depend greatly on power and social hierarchies, with women and girls often being less food secure than men and boys even within the same household. Moreover, social roles, such as the socialization of a mother to feed her children, impact food insecurity and its consequences. This study aims to uncover the relationships between food insecurity and mental health for women in the Chitwan Valley of Nepal. Utilizing longitudinal data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study, we connect food security data from 2015 with mental health data collected from 2016 to 2018. We find that women have a higher prevalence of major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and panic attacks than men, especially if they are experiencing food insecurity. Among women, we find that those who have recently experienced severe food insecurity have a significantly higher likelihood of meeting diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks than food-secure women. However, women's food insecurity is not significantly correlated with major depressive disorder. Moreover, we find that food insecurity is likely to co-occur with women's agricultural and wage work. These findings suggest a need for gender-attentive policy and programs accounting for both causes and consequences of food insecurity.

Friends, experts or witches: doing feminist research in challenging political contexts

The article explores methodological and ethical tensions arising from positionality and reflexivity while doing feminist research in a challenging parliamentary setting, specifically one that includes radical-right populist actors that use anti-gender rhetoric. Reflecting upon positionality is vital for qualitative researchers, especially those engaged in critical feminist research, where gendered power hierarchies between researchers and their environment demand daily manoeuvring and subsequent analytical concern. We explore how the gender of the researchers, gender equality as a research topic, our feminist positionalities, and intersectional aspects shaped the research process in the context of the European Parliament. The article contributes to the literature on feminist positionalities and reflexivity by discussing not only the ambiguities emerging from our empirical research choices, such as engaging with radical-right actors, but also the other ‘critical ingredients’ that feminism handles, such as identities, relationships, power and affects, reflecting how they are interwoven with relationships and interactions in the field.

Critical reflection in team-based practice: A narrative review.

Research on critical reflection (a process of recognising and challenging assumptions that frame health care practice) has demonstrated strong potential for making health care more collaborative and equitable, yet its enactment within team-based health care remains underexplored. We conducted a narrative review to advance understanding of how critical reflection develops, occurs in and impacts team-based practice and care. We searched three databases (Medline, CINAHL and Scopus) for articles related to the concepts of critical reflection and/or critically reflective practice in the context of team-based health care and examined how teams engage with those theoretical concepts, to inform ideas for a new approach to support critically reflective practice. The search identified 974 citations of which nine articles showed elements of critical reflection in team-based practice. However, since only one of the nine included articles explicitly used the term 'critical reflection' in their research, critical reflection as a theoretical concept was found to be largely missing from the current team-based health care literature. Instead, aspects of critical reflection were evident in terms of challenging power hierarchies and questioning practice assumptions through dialogue, with a goal of collaborative practice. This sharing of knowledge and skills allowed teams to push boundaries and innovate together in practice. The included articles also emphasised the importance of creating a purposeful environment for open dialogue and practice change to occur. To support equitable care through collaborative practices, we suggest dialogue as and for critical reflection should be explicitly developed and researched within team-based health care.

‘Becoming manly’: white South African defence force veterans negotiating masculinity

ABSTRACT This study examines how white South African men reflect on their experiences of being and becoming army veterans, while negotiating masculinity. In the context of ‘high apartheid’, Afrikaner domination of the socio-political landscape, ethnic and racialised inequalities, the veterans negotiated being white English-speaking men through reflecting on, critiquing and disassociating from military masculinity. An English South African masculinity was upheld by distancing from Afrikaner domination and values, violence and compulsory heterosexuality. These findings suggest that while a military masculinity offered men a powerful template to assert their authority as white men, such power was nuanced by English South Africans’ relative political impotence, the domination of Afrikaans as a language and illustrates the heterogeneity in the experience of white veteran masculinity under apartheid. At the same time, however, white English veterans were complicit in and benefitted from whiteness and the power accrued in the country by virtue of race, class and history of British colonialism. We argue that the experience of being and becoming conscripts and the reflection on military masculinity directs attention to the ways in which broader social and political contexts have effects for the shaping of masculinity reflecting hierarchies of power and fluidity.

Marginality in the berry fields: hierarchical ordering of food and agrarian systems in Norway

AbstractAlthough being essential to sustaining food production, migrant workers continuously find themselves at the bottom of the social and power hierarchy in food and agrarian systems around the world. Effects and origins of hierarchical ordering in food and agrarian systems increasingly gather public, political, and academic attention, however, how it matters for these systems remains little understood. As such, this paper aims to understand how hierarchical ordering shapes migrant worker marginality and links it to the contemporary formations of food and agrarian systems. To do so, this paper explores engaged and embodied dimensions of disadvantaged migrant worker realities. This is done by drawing on research conducted in Norway, mainly consisting of interviews with migrant agri-food worker and farmers, as well as ethnographic data from Norwegian berry farms and supporting document analysis. The analysis reveals a complex picture of the power and reach of hierarchical ordering as it directly and indirectly impacts migrant workers in the Norwegian berry fields, as well as ideas around narrow divisions in food and agrarian systems and society more broadly that are implicated in naturalizing and internalizing such ordering. Following these insights, the paper proposes a theorization of food and agrarian systems as hierarchical projects– structures that find their foundations in patterned ordering that arranges and regularizes power hierarchies on the count of differences.

Contestation from Below: Status and Revisionism in Hierarchy

Abstract Existing scholarship suggests that rising powers can become revisionist powers when they are dissatisfied with their status. What causes such dissatisfaction? Conventional wisdom holds that rising powers become dissatisfied when established powers refuse to recognize them as equals. However, if status informs patterns of superiority and inferiority, then rising powers can also become dissatisfied when smaller states do not defer to them. In fact, I argue that there is a life cycle as to how status dissatisfaction develops: status disputes between rising powers and smaller states can be especially frequent early in the power transition, before status disputes between rising powers and established powers become more prevalent. Through text analysis of an original dataset of statements from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1978 to 2018, supplemented by survey and archival evidence, I demonstrate that contestations from smaller states trigger the majority of China’s status grievances, and China-smaller states status disputes are especially prevalent early on. Thus, status-driven revisionism can emerge via bottom-up processes, and it can happen earlier than currently theorized. My analysis highlights the agency of smaller states in shaping power transitions and hierarchies, as well as how and when the US–China competition unfolds.

Hierarchy and Typology of Political Culture

This article discusses political structure and culture with a focus on several key dimensions, namely the physical structure of politics, the social structure of politics, and various types of political culture. The physical structure of politics refers to the formal institutions and political mechanisms that influence the process of political action. The socio-political structure includes the distribution of power and social hierarchies that influence political dynamics in society. Furthermore, this article outlines the different types of political culture, including a political parochial culture that shows minimal involvement in national political affairs, a political subjective culture that reflects individuals' political attitudes and orientations towards power and political participation, and a political participatory culture that encourage active participation in the political process. Through an analysis of the physical and socio-political structures, as well as various political cultures, this article provides a more accurate understanding of the complexity of politics in modern societies. The implications of this understanding for public policy development and political system development are also discussed in depth.

”Detta hav av orättvisa”

“This sea of injustice”. Motherhood and Colonialism in Sara Lidman’s Jag och min son Exploring Sara Lidman’s novel Jag och min son (1961,1963), this article delves into its nuanced intersection of motherhood and colonialism. The narrative scrutinizes Sweden’s role in the colonial system, with a particular focus on the South African apartheid regime. Through the lens of a Swedish single father navigating Johannesburg in pursuit of personal enrichment, the story highlights his strained relationship to several mother figures, unraveling complex threads that intertwine parenthood, colonial structures, and whiteness. Using the theoretical framework of motherhood studies, such as the concept of the other-mother, the analysis seeks to unveil the intricate capitalist dynamics of familial relationships within the context of international power hierarchies. These themes in Lidman’s works would only grow stronger in the years to come, and by examining Jag och min son, these early tendencies in Lidman’s writing are illuminated.

Protecting National Sovereignty: The ‘Australian Model’ and the Exclusion of Asylum Seekers

Increasingly, the ‘Australian model’ of offshore detention is promoted to restrict asylum seeker migration and preserve national sovereignty. This article analyses metaphor usage within press coverage of immigration to examine the origins of this discourse. Focusing on two high points of asylum seeker arrivals (2001–2002, 2012–2013), I demonstrate how negative metaphor use constructed asylum seekers as racialized, illegitimate, illegal Others, who breached Australian sovereignty. I argue that this was a response to a crisis of settler-colonial legitimacy, exacerbated by calls for Indigenous sovereignty, with anti-asylum discourse utilized as a tool to negate and neutralize Indigenous sovereignty claims and legitimate settler-colonial state power. I further argue that sovereignty claims were employed to reinforce Australia’s positioning within regional hierarchies of power, through the enactment of offshore processing agreements with less powerful, ostensibly ‘sovereign’ nations, thereby reaffirming and legitimating a racialized, neo-colonial ordering of the world.

Grave and cemetery as a manifestation of social behaviours. A few thoughts on the example of early medieval burials from the Chełmno-Dobrzyń zone

Starting point for the study of social behavior based on funeral rituals material traces is an assumption both cemeteries and burials (which are part of them) are, in a certain part, a reflection of social relations. Results of the necropolis sources analysis in their spatial context can provide plenty of information necessary to describe a social structure, determine a hierarchy and system of power, determine the financial status of deceased and reconstruct existing relationships between individuals and groups, and in general, development and a complexity of social organization studies. The article presents a few chosen issues regarding social activities manifested in graves and entire necropolises appearance (based on graves from cemeteries in Chełmno-Dobrzyń zone - Kałdus, Gruczno, Pień and Napole among others). Examples discussed in the article are an expression of socially regulated and consciously undertaken activities, expressing a certain consensus which guaranteed the stable development of local communities. Funeral practices, which were subordinated to constantly changing social rules on the one hand and accepted various dissimilarities on the other (including sepulchral customs originating from ethnically, religiously and culturally alien environments), were important part of it. Unusual burials characterized by a different deceased arrangement in graves, an equipment, and a non-standard grave constructions are traces of these practices. Social relations, including family and intergenerational ties, expressed in double and multiple burials among others, can be found in a cemetery. Necropolises could be considered, in this way, as a mirror reflection of a "spatialized" social order. The order transferred into the eschatological dimension.