Powerless Individuals Research Articles

Teenagers under the knife: a decivilising process

The contradiction emerging between the lived experience of a minority of marginalised urban youth and the punitive operant conditioning of antisocial behaviour legislation is illustrative of the increasing gap between society's expectations of behaviour and the coming reality. In this paper, Loic Wacquant's sociology of advanced marginality is combined with Norbert Elias' concept of civilising and decivilising processes and applied to the dilemma of young offenders in a typical UK city. It identifies increasing educational exclusion and institutional abandonment in affected ‘neighbourhoods of relegation’. This process is part of a general trend towards the desocialisation of labour, which ushers in a reactionary, violent decivilising process among the minority most affected, where use of violence becomes the foundation of repute for otherwise powerless individuals, or for gangs in their control of small urban spaces. By analysing this dilemma from the perspective of the ‘perpetrators’ rather than the victims of knife crime, we seek to describe their praxis; that is, the nature of their habitus or consciousness.

Radicalizing maledom: The Hercules Parade and simulacrum of corporate masculinity before and after Times Square's metamorphosis

This paper demonstrates how a desire for new manhood has been expressed, shamed, and performed within the economic and racial subordination of a common gay experience limited by conceptions of American freedoms of speech. Through looking specifically at the act of cruising, I show how a distinctly feminist politics in the twentieth century emancipates a radical queerness against the excluding logic of culturally powerless individuals under a bourgeois capitalist ethos. Where liberal ideology fails to recover freedoms of speech, for sub-cultural communities, a set of radically embodied discourses, or what I call a politics of ‗desire‘, subverts and reinvents bourgeois masculinity through new acts. Times Square rises to the American progressive vanguard as a site for the competing discourses of a politics of minority philosophy that contrasts with the surveillance of those deemed culturally illicit, and those with ‗public rights‘. Yet the state surveillance and transformation of the urban subject, seen here, has continued to haunt the survival processes that frame an all-too visible state racial, sexual, and political system that undercuts what futures might be realised in feminist and anti-racist alliances.

The world is out of control: Nimrod Antal's Kontroll (2003) as a socio-political critique of powerless individuals in a postmodern world

ABSTRACTWhen applied to Nimrod Antal's 2003 film Kontroll, David Harvey's theory in The Condition of Postmodernity of time—space compression illustrates the impact of the subway as a symbol of both the urban centre and the fractured and spliced condition of capitalist societies. Antal's Hungarian and American experiences influence his choices as a film-maker in conveying themes of power over the powerless. The questions surrounding the main character reveal a critique of modern society and the capitalist world. Who is pushing people from the subway platforms? It is my contention that this question raised throughout Antal's film illustrates the push that people feel under the strain of capitalism and modern society.

Illegitimacy improves goal pursuit in powerless individuals

The effects of power legitimacy on self-regulation during goal pursuit were examined. Study 1 focused on goal-setting and goal-striving. Specifically, it examined how much time legitimate and illegitimate powerless individuals needed to set goals, and how many means they generated to pursue these goals. Study 2 examined persistence in the face of difficulties. Consistently across these studies illegitimacy improved self-regulation in powerless individuals. Illegitimate powerless individuals behaved similarly as control participants. They took less time to decide on a course of action, used more flexible means to strive for goals, and persisted longer in the face of difficulties, compared to their legitimate counterparts. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Yangmen Nüjiang (Heroines of the Yang Family), Baishe Zhuan (Legend of the White Snake), Bawang Bieji (Farewell My Concubine), Guifei Zuijiu (The Drunken Beauty) (review)

YANGMEN NUJIANG (HEROINES OF THE YANG FAMILY), BAISHE ZHUAN (LEGEND OF THE WHITE SNAKE), BAWANG BIEJI (FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE), GUIFEI ZUIJIU (THE DRUNKEN BEAUTY). By Mei Lanfang Troupe. Artistic director Mei Baojiu. Kodak Theater, Hollywood, California, 10-11 October 2008. In 1930, Mei Lanfang entered the City of Angels after a long, tumultuous ship ride across the Pacific and was embraced by a wildly enthusiastic crowd. This marked the entrance of the Chinese celebrity whose name was already well known to the international theater community well before he had even set foot on the Los Angles stage. Mei Lanfang's illuminating performance, as well as his encounter with Hollywood luminaries Charlie Chaplin, Anna May Wong, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford would all become a part of Mei's legend to be reminisced and researched long after the iconic actor's return to China. Almost eighty years later, the same troupe, led by Mei Lanfang's youngest son Mei Baojiu (b. 1934), performed to an enthusiastic audience who flocked to the Kodak Theater in Hollywood to witness the historical return of this legendary troupe to a place where the original legend maker once conquered the stage. The performance marked not just a celebration of the consummate art of jingju (Beijing opera), but also brought out impressive crowds from the ever growing Southern California Chinese community. Much has changed since Mei Lanfang's visit to Los Angeles in 1930. In 2008, Chinese Americans are no longer powerless individuals without rights to citizenship, nor are they the economically disadvantaged minority group they once were. Their pronounced visibility and political power in the Los Angeles area today, as seen in the congratulatory remarks placed in the performance program by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and other elected officials, constitute a far different notion of Chinese Americans than the impoverished and discriminated-against assembly of laborers of the 1930s. Perhaps Rosana Hsu, the president of the California Institute of the Chinese Performing Arts (CICPA) and a sole sponsor of the tour, which rented the Kodak Theater in Hollywood for two nights in a row, best exemplifies this shift in the status of Chinese Americans. As a dedicated patron of traditional Chinese opera, she has spared no resources in introducing these genres to the Chinese American community as well as a certain cross section of the mainstream American public. Born into a wealthy family in China, she was able to enjoy a wide spectrum of the jingju repertoire from an early age in private performances at her house and learn arias from the guest singers. Her passion and taste for the extravagant jingju obviously has lasted a lifetime, culminating in the establishment of CICPA in 1994, which, since its founding, has been inviting numerous opera performers from mainland China to perform in a 275-seat theater in El Monte, California. It was Hsu's insistence on bringing the Mei Lanfang Troupe as soon as possible to the Los Angeles area that set the performance date in 2008 instead of a few years later. As one anonymous organizer told me, an event of this magnitude, with over fifty performers, thirteen orchestra members, and numerous other crew and technical staff, and with sets and costumes for six different plays, often takes several years to organize and publicize. But with blinding persistence, Hsu has made it possible for fortunate Southern California audience members to bear witness to the historic return of the star-studded troupe, which has not performed in the United States since Mei Lanfang's appearance in 1930. The seats in the Kodak Theatre were filled mostly by Chinese Americans for the two-night extravaganza, but also attending were a few non-Chinese, such as academics like myself and other curious spectators. On the opening night (10 October) at the reception before the performance Mei Baojiu appeared to the excited crowd. …

Power and affordances: When the situation has more power over powerful than powerless individuals.

Six studies examined how power affects responses to situational affordances. Participants were assigned to a powerful or a powerless condition and were exposed to various situations that afford different classes of behavior. Study 1 examined behavior intentions for weekdays and weekends. Studies 2 and 3 focused on responses to imaginary social and work situations. Study 4 examined planned behavior for winter and summer days. Finally, Studies 5 and 6 examined behavior and attention in the presence of situation-relevant and irrelevant information. Consistently across these studies, powerful individuals acted more in situation-consistent ways, and less in situation-inconsistent ways, compared with powerless individuals. These findings are interpreted as a result of the greater tendency for powerful individuals to process information selectively in line with the primary factors that drive cognition, such as affordances. One consequence of these findings is that powerful individuals change behavior across situations more than powerless individuals.

Behaviour variability and the Situated Focus Theory of Power

Power often affects judgement and behaviour differently in different contexts. The present chapter proposes the Situated Focus Theory of Power in an attempt to explain the greater variability in the behaviour and judgements of powerful compared to powerless individuals. It is proposed that power increases attunement to the situation by means of selective attention and processing flexibility. Factors that drive cognition such as motivation (e.g., needs, goals, expectancies), inner experiences (e.g., feelings, ease of retrieval), as well as properties of the environment (e.g., affordances), guide more unequivocally the responses of powerful compared to powerless individuals. Powerful individuals process more extensively information that is relevant compared to information that is irrelevant to these factors, whereas powerless individuals attend more equally to different types of information. These differences in processing focus affect content-free aspects of behaviour. Specifically, power promotes readiness to act, prioritisation, and behaviour variability across situations.

Power and Goal Pursuit

Powerful individuals more easily acquire desired outcomes compared to powerless individuals. The authors argue that these differences can partly be attributed to self-regulation. The effects of power on the ability to act in a goal-consistent manner were analyzed across different phases of goal pursuit. Study 1 examined goal setting, Study 2 focused on the initiation of goal-directed action, Study 3 examined persistence and flexibility, and Study 4 assessed responses to good opportunities for goal pursuit and the role of implementation intentions. Consistently across studies, power facilitated prioritization and goal-consistent behavior. Power had, however, independent effects from implementation intentions. Consequences for performance are discussed.

Power affects basic cognition: Increased attentional inhibition and flexibility

The present article examines effects of power on basic cognition. It proposes that power bolsters the ability to attend to information selectively; enhancing the processing of information that is related to accessible constructs in detriment of peripheral, less accessible information. In contrast, powerlessness increases attunement to peripheral information, inducing greater distractibility and less attentional flexibility. Experiment 1 focuses on attention to an object and its context. Experiment 2 examines attentional focus and readiness to act. Experiment 3 examines attention to global vs. local aspects of a focal target. Powerful individuals, relative to powerless individuals, showed greater ability to inhibit peripheral information, and greater ability to focus attention in line with the demands of the task. Furthermore, inhibiting peripheral information facilitated action. The consequences of these findings for different domains are discussed.

Social power

AbstractIn the present article, we discuss and compare recent theoretical and empirical contributions to the growing body of research on social power. In the last decade, five different theories on power have been proposed. These theories can be distinguished according to whether they focus on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup or ideological processes. Our analysis leads us to claim that future theoretical contributions would have much to gain by addressing the issue of social power on multiple levels of analysis. The recent empirical work on social power suggests that powerful individuals and members of powerful groups differ from powerless individuals and members of powerless groups with regard to (a) how they perceive and judge others, (b) how they are evaluated as targets, and (c) how they behave. Those who have power perceive others more stereotypically and judge them more negatively. They also tend to take action more frequently and generally behave in a more variable manner. This difference in objective variability is further reinforced by perceivers' tendency to exaggerate the variability of high power groups. The latter two effects contribute to the phenomenon that high power groups are less often the target of stereotypes than low power groups. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Abstract Allegory of Griselda Gambaro's Stripped (El despojamiento)

In this one-act play, written as Argentina began to slide into a repressive dictatorship and produced just as the country was returning to democracy, Griselda Gambaro improvises on the allegorical genre so as to allow for multiple, simultaneous, interdependent perspectives on an enigmatic theatrical universe. "Abstract allegory," as practiced by Gambaro, is a more sophisticated political and aesthetic strategy than either what Fredric Jameson calls "national allegory," which simply tells one (private) story to refer to another (public) issue, or what Doris Sommer refers to as "dialectical" allegory, in which two narratives are equally significant and mutually constructed. Just as any one of the fractured forms in an abstract painting might hint at a landscape or a human figure, the drama simultaneously alludes to several antagonisms between powerless individuals and menacing authority figures: 1) women oppressed by abusive men; 2) ordinary civilians at the mercy of low-level torturers; and 3) civilian leaders subjugated by military authorities.

Good Intentions

This article explores the practical enforcement of laws that increase criminal penalties for bias-related crimes. A review of the literature suggests that penalty-enhancement statutes are meeting some of their goals. At the same time, police implementation is highly variable, prosecutions are rare, and convictions are even rarer. This article summarizes the practical and legal hurdles to enforcement of hate crime laws, including issues regarding enforcement by local police, difficulties in proving motivation, and controversies surrounding deterrence and the larger societal impact of the laws. Because hate crime laws have been operationalized with little or no attention to societal power dynamics and social inequalities, their paradoxical consequences may include disproportionate punishment of minorities whom they were intended to protect. Furthermore, hate crime laws shine their spotlight on relatively powerless individuals at the bottom of the social order and away from the societal institutions that promote or condone discriminatory conduct.

Some Notes on Childhood in a South African Peripatetic Community

The Karretjie People: An Overview The Karretjie People, or Cart People, of the Colesberg district of the Karoo represent a peripatetic community within the South African context. They are dependent upon other communities for food resources and do not own land. Sheep-sheafing, which is the special, and often only skill of the men, is also a service they perform for the farming community in this relatively wealthy agricultural part of the country. It necessitates very frequent spatial mobility, which is enabled by a cart (hence, Karretjie People) and donkeys. The Karretjie People may, following Rao's (1987) definition of the term, be qualified as peripatetics--they are `primarily non-food producing, preferentially endogamous, itinerant communities subsisting mainly on the sale of specialised services to sedentary customers'. They are also a disadvantaged community, locked within a wider society in which their position is defined by the fact that they are perceived as `foreigners' and as `different', and are not integrated with the host community. In this sense the Karretjie People also fit Simmel's description of the Stranger as being `fixed within a particular spatial group ... but his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning' (Simmel 1950). The vulnerability and inferior status of the Karretjie People are closely related to the socio-economic and socio-political factors characteristic of the area, their complete dependence on the fanning community, and also to seasonal factors, which result in fluctuating income during the annual cycle. Foraging communities were the earliest inhabitants of this region, and data suggest that so were the ancestors of the Karretjie People. The Karretjie People themselves explain their origin in terms of a vague but uncertain identity of being Bushmen or `Yellow People', as they often refer to themselves. Most of them have lived permanently or semi-permanently on farms and have a history of moving between different farms and from employer to employer before leading their present nomadic existence. Since they do not own land, they use certain outspans (1) regularly, where they establish their temporary homes. When they axe not shearing sheep on a particular farm, a number of karretjie (donkey carts) units with at least one earning member usually camp at different outspans, where they are accessible to farmers wishing to employ them. If a whole Karretjie family accompanies a shearer during a sheafing assignment, it depends on the particular farmer where they erect their karretjie homes. The farmer usually lets them use part of his property as temporary `home base' and once the job is done, they move on again. The women and older children often assist in the shearing shed, sorting the wool and sweeping wool from the floor. Some farmers may prefer to fetch only the men who do the shearing, in which case the women and children stay behind on the outspan (De Jongh and Steyn 1994). The donkey cart which provides for their mobility also forms part of their temporary shelters and may be regarded as a unit, in terms of socialisation and for domestic purposes. In most instances, each karretjie unit is comprised of a nuclear family which is potentially independent, while different family units, normally related, may decide to occupy a particular outspan, socialise, travel and work together. This article is concerned with the lives of the Karretjie children, (2) who are probably among the most severely deprived in the country. The socio-economic and socio-political circumstances of their parents and other itinerant adults obviously also impact the children, indeed even more intensely, because of their status both as children and as Karretjie People, which means that they occupy the lowest rung on the hierarchical ladder of the broader district community. The children can, in fact, be regarded as the most powerless individuals in the area, given their parents' low status and the stigmatisation of the Karretjie People in general. …

The Settlement Experiences of Taiwanese Immigrants in Brisbane

The objective of this paper is to document and explore the findings of a survey carried out in Brisbane from 16 August to 15 September 1999, on the settlement experiences of recent Taiwanese immigrants, their motive for immigration and their perception of Australian society. Ethnic immigrants in advanced industrialized countries have long been depicted as passive and powerless individuals. In the past fifty years, this tendency to portray migrants as disadvantaged victims has remained largely intact. However, the new wave of immigrants that arrived in the late 1980s mostly came from economically affluent north-east Asian countries, particularly from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many of these people were skilled or professionally qualified independent immigrants, and a large number of them were in fact entrepreneurs who brought capital and other economic resources. Therefore, their settlement experiences may not necessarily involve marginalisation and dependency, nor is it appropriate to argue that they would be potential victims of structural discrimination. This study of the settlement experiences of Taiwanese immigrants in Brisbane aims, firstly, to examine the forces that motivated Taiwanese citizens to immigrate to Australia. Secondly, it explores the social and occupational mobility of Taiwanese immigrants measured by the changes in their self-identified class location between Taiwan and Australia. Finally, it investigates the sense of belonging of Taiwanese immigrants, and their interactions with their home country.

Naming Resistance: Ethnographers, Dissidents, and States

Ethnographic analyses of political dissidence are deeply implicated in the political contests about which ethnographers write. A comparison of the authors' fieldwork among dissidents in Argentina, Kenya, and the United States reveals both the differing dynamics of contests over the political and the complex ways that ethnographers are situated within such contests. In Argentina during the last period of military rule it was dangerous to be defined as political; in Kenya, when multiparty elections were finally authorized, being recognized as political was a prerequisite for legitimacy; and in the United States, where protest is officially legal but unofficially suspect, being defined as political has advantages and disadvantages. We argue that ethnographic writing is inextricable from such contests, and we advocate more explicit attention to how anthropologists negotiate their positions during fieldwork and how they reposition themselves through their writing. [resistance, repression, fieldwork, reflexivity, writing] This article grew out of conversations in which we, Susan Coutin and Susan Hirsch, discovered similarities in our experiences as ethnographers studying political movements and law. While conducting research-Coutin in Argentina and the U.S. and Hirsch in Kenya-we each witnessed or heard about shocking incidents of repression that acquainted us with the terror of overt domination. We realized that we shared the belief that our visibility as researchers and our connections to activists had subjected us to being monitored by those responsible for these incidents. We also worried that our own research and writing could in some way endanger those whose activities we had studied. Reflecting on our own experiences being as dissidents while conducting research made us think more carefully about what it means for ethnographers to label people's actions as particularly when such namings can make individuals, groups, and practices politically suspect in authorities' eyes. The question of who has the agency, authority, power, and position to designate a practice is of critical concern in theorizing resistance and is especially germane to recent debates over the concept of everyday resistance. Those who developed this concept argued that opposition to domination takes myriad forms and that even actions and organizations that actors do not define as political can implicitly critique the structures of power, such as capitalism and racism, in which they are embedded (see Comaroff 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Scott 1985; Thompson 1975). Although we recognize that these analysts intended to give credit to apparently powerless individuals and groups for attempting to transform the conditions of their existence, we argue, based on our experiences conducting research in repressive situations, that ethnographic namings of resistance are problematic. Not only do these namings risk reducing the agency of individuals and groups attempting to define their own actions, but also, in that they address an academic audience, ethnographic namings of resistance frequently position ethnographers outside of the political contests that they describe. We are not arguing that resistance must be conscious and intentional to be named as such (see Hobsbawm 1959; Jenkins 1983), but rather that when ethnographers name actions as resistance, they engage ideological and political structures and positionings outside the academy, whether they acknowledge these or not. By juxtaposing various namings of resistance by ethnographers, dissidents, and states, we seek to reconnect the politics of fieldwork with those of ethnographic writing. We argue that such a reconnection is critical to creating a more politically attuned and ethically responsible social science. We view naming as a strategic and contested process, one that is simultaneously a calculated response to particular political circumstances and an expression of individuals' and groups' understandings of their own and others' positions and actions. …

Gender, status and 'powerless' speech: interactions of students and lecturers.

The present study investigated whether the use of 'powerless' speech was affected by role status, speaker's gender and gender of another participant. Fifty-two university lecturers and 156 students participated. Students were paired with a lecturer or student of the same or opposite sex. The findings placed a question mark over the link between powerless speech and individuals of low role status. Moreover, against hypothesis, speaker's gender and gender of partner did not affect the use of qualifiers or fillers, although they affected the use of tag questions and some types of hesitation. A qualitative analysis was also conducted which suggested that the powerless features were, in fact, multi-functional with respect to power. In addition, the importance of a variety of interactional techniques, such as credibility techniques, in the creation or negotiation of relational power was documented. As a whole, these findings highlight problems with the concept of 'powerless' speech, at least with respect to relational power.

Gender and conversational interaction Ed. by Deborah Tannen (review)

BOOK NOTICES 621 Swann does not merely adopt a feminist stance in making her suggestions for teaching; she balances feminist advocacy with critical questioning , acknowledging the issue, for example, of whether 'equality' is always desirable. She concludes that equal opportunity initiatives need to be considered in the context of each school and classroom. GiWi, boys, and language is structured more like a textbook than a research study. It makes heavy use of chapter summaries, repeats key ideas, and surveys a wide array of research conducted over the past fifteen years. It is therefore easily readable and would be an appropriate text for undergraduate students in linguistics and education. [Ruth E. Ray, Wayne State University .] Gender and conversational interaction. Ed. by Deborah Tannen. (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics.) New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 327. Cloth $45.00, paper $16.95. Over the past twenty years, the relationship between gender and language has been explored by a variety of methods and approached from different standpoints. The editor characterizes the approach used in this collection as 'ethnographically oriented discourse analysis or, alternatively , interactional sociolinguistics' (3). The book's ten papers, five of which have appeared elsewhere, are grouped into four parts. In Part I, 'Talking among friends' (15-80), the first two papers focus on junior high school and high school girls' talk. Among the findings by Donna Eder is that the girls of the group she studied were able to detach themselves from traditional views of feminine behavior through humor and verbal play. Penelope Eckert discusses how the girls in her study group negotiated behavioral norms and balanced through talk the conflicting needs for popularity and independence . Barbara Johnstone, who analyzes spontaneous stories based on personal experience told by white middle-class midwestern men and women, seeks to determine the sources of power the storytellers draw on to overcome dangerous situations. According to the author, because women often consider themselves powerless individuals, the source of their power is the community, its resources being tapped through discourse. By contrast, power for men comes from individual actions in opposition to the actions of others. Part II, 'Conflict talk' (81-162), also consists of three papers. The first two are based on research conducted among American schoolchildren . Amy Sheldon shows that the gendered nature ofchildren's peer talk may be established as early as the age of three, with boys tending to be more heavy-handed and controlling. Next Marjorie Harness Goodwin points up the differences between boys' and girls' dispute stories . Whereas boys tend to deal with the wrongdoings of present participants at the time, girls confront the offending party at some future time. The third paper is based on research among speakers ofTzeltal in the southern Mexican community of Tenejapa. Penelope Brown examines women's discourse in the only setting in which peasant Mayan women may engage in direct confrontation—the court. According to Brown, 'even when [Tenejapan] women are not being polite, characteristic female strategies of indirectness and politeness are manifested in their speech ... [and accordingly] for a deeper understanding of language and gender, we need to take very detailed looks at gender behavior in different situations' (159). The remaining sections, 'The relativity of discourse strategies' (163-227) and 'Critical reviews of the literature' (229-312), comprise two papers each. In Part III, Deborah Tannen demonstrates that 'the intersection of language and gender provides a rich site for analyzing how power and solidarity are created in discourse ' (183). Among the questions Carole Edelsky asks is, 'Under what conditions do men and women interact (e.g., hold the floor) more or less as equals and under what conditions do they not?' (221). That apparently depends on whether whoever has the floor controls it or shares it with others: in the former case men tended to be dominant, whereas in the latter case men talked less than women. The two critical reviews take up interruptions as a means of controlling interactions and gender differences in the amount of talk. According to Deborah James & Sandra Clarke, when it comes to interruptions, the majority of studies do not support any significant difference between men and women—other things being equal. And as to...

A Theatre of Their Own: the Cultural Spaces of Moscow and Leningrad Amateur Studios 1957–1986

In a society where is at a premium and families wait years for their own apartment, the allocation of physical serves as a powerful means for social and control. In the Soviet Union, this phenomenon affected not only kolkhozniki and other individuals who hoped to attain residency permits in major cities. These policies also hobbled the development of organizations which offered alternative viewpoints to official ideology. In the post-Stalin period, urban complexity made strict control increasingly difficult, and professionals and amateurs together began to carve out new in officially sanctioned amateur (samodeiateVnye) theatres. Known as studios for their commitment to training and experimentation, the best of these troupes created innovative productions that made a noteworthy impact on the landscape because of their marginal amateur status. Their contribution goes beyond their revival of the small stage as a provocative medium for performance. Their survival in spite of bureaucratic obstacles ensured an enclave for other nonconformist performers and spectators dissatisfied with orthodox theatre in particular and Soviet society in general. As a result, these ensembles provided for behavior and values that participants perceived to be discouraged elsewhere. Using various metaphors of space, an examination of these amateur troupes in Moscow and Leningrad highlights their significance for both theatrical trends and broad changes in Soviet society during this period. Notions of cultural space encompass the impact of physical locations as well as abstract spaces that define relationships among various groups in a society. The ability of supposedly powerless individuals to redefine these offers insight into their ability to control change in modern societies, including those dominated by authoritarian regimes. The study of amateur theatre within the paradigm of presents an opportunity to situate theatrical developments within the Soviet Union's broader socio-cultural context. As such, it bridges the disciplines of theatre and history. In most cases, scholars of Soviet theatre focus their analyses on innovations in dramatic texts and production techniques; if included, contextual

The Russian entrepreneur

Despite a significant interest in business and entrepreneurial activities in the former USSR, there continues to be a shortage of accurate information to dispel some of the myths and misinformation particularly about entrepreneurial activities occurring in the new Russia. Since the inner workings of the economic environment in the former USSR have rarely been described or understood, it is important to view present day entrepreneurs in the context of the country's historical perspective and entrepreneurial predecessors. While never in the forefront of the largely political stage of the country during the Tsarist and Soviet periods, entrepreneurs have nonetheless been consistently present throughout the country's history. Even though most everyone was engaged to some extent in some form of commercial activity, entrepreneurs from the 16th to the 19th century were thought to be inferior individuals. As a consequence, entrepreneurs were oppressed, heavily taxed, powerless individuals at the bottom level of society. But for a few notable exceptions, even Peter the Great's program to create a class of industrialists failed to develop entrepreneurs. In spite of this significant hindrance, entrepreneurship developed and flourished during the Tsarist period, mainly due to the geographical, economic and social, psychological, and political factors. Socialism, the State's domination of the economy, and the centrally planned economy impacted the type and extent of entrepreneurship during the Soviet period. Soviet entrepreneurs, though existing in the shadow economy, were hampered by several factors: only being exposed to mostly secondhand, printed information, not having a lawful mechanism to transfer the risk of entrepreneurship from the State to the individual, not being in sync with the ultimate purpose of the country's economic activity to further the interests of the State, and dealing with an economic situation where production units were separated from research and development units. Three entrepreneurial scenarios of a high-tech company, a Russian brokerage company, and an educational organization, are presented that exemplify the entrepreneurial talent and ability present in the country. To the extent that these scenarios are repeated in a variety of industries by many different entrepreneurs, the successful movement to a progressive market-oriented economy will be speeded.

Sex, dissidence and damnation: minority groups in the Middle Ages

For the potentates of medieval Europe (of both Church and State) dissent struck at the roots of their ordered settled world. To allow a single heretic or free spirit to escape just punishment would, they believed, doom the whole structure of society to decay and dissolution. So dissent was extirpated, first by reason, then by argument, and then with increasing savagery. Dissent was to be removed from the face of the Earth by fire and the sword, by strangulation and the ultimate refinements of torture. But why was the danger felt to be so great and so immediate, from a small minority of mostly poor and powerless individuals? Jeffrey Richards has looked at the persecuted lives of heretics, witches, Jews, prostitutes, lepers and homosexuals, and discovered a common motive for their sufferings. The chief link is sexual abberance. The Church sought to tighten and regulate even the most intimate details of human life, but without much success. Tacitly, unofficial sexual practices were tolerated. But progressively, deviance was seen as having a malign influence not just in an individual life, but in the world at large. At a time when the Second Coming was expected, men and women were expected to lead godly lives - anything less was an outrage. And as the power structures of society solidified, the deviants became convenient scapegoats. The rise of Islam, the spread of disease, especially the Black Death, were laid at their door. They became the scapegoats for a fearful world. Jeffrey Richards charts the shifting perceptions of sex, dissidence and damnation throughout the Middle Ages, and enables readers to form their own judgements.