Public Ideology Research Articles

The Gendered Division of Labor in Parental Caretaking:

Public ideology dictates that families take responsibility for the care of their frail and vulnerable members. Women more than men are the unpaid, informal caregivers of family members. This gendered division of labor is examined by using the U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation. Differences between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan sons' and daughters' parental caregiving activities are examined in order to contrast areas having more traditional, conventional or conservative values with those adopting more feminist values. Results show that in addition to daughters performing the vast majority of tasks, there is a difference between the types of care provided by metropolitan and nonmetropolitan daughters. Nonmetropolitan daughters tend to perform more caregiving tasks considered to be traditional women's work while metropolitan daughters perform significantly more tasks considered to be nontraditional for women. The fmdings suggest that providing care is due more to socialization to gender ro...

Engagement and recruitment for family therapy research in community settings

Based on the recruitment experience in a family therapy research project with heroin addicts, this paper explores the difficulties of researcher networking with other social service agencies. Concepts from contextual family therapy are used to explore four general areas that contribute to successful intra-agency relationships: 1) Evaluating the nature of larger system relationships; 2) identifying the resources and needs of a clinic; 3) joining with the counseling staff; and 4) addressing the impact of public policy and ideology on clinic life. A case of engaging one clinic is presented and nine guidelines for engaging large community settings for participation in family therapy research are offered. These areas are considered in light of the relational dynamics that arise when working with multiple social service systems.

Feminism: A Generation Later

Investigations by political psychologists reveal some of the changes in public opinion, gender consciousness, and gender ideology that have taken place since the beginning of the women's movement. There is more general acceptance of equality between the sexes, but even young people still show some adherence to traditional divisions of roles, and traditional gender ideology still plays a part in maintaining inequality. There is still widespread support for a women's movement, especially among women.

Women's Perspectives on Informal Care of the Elderly: Public Ideology and Personal Experience of Giving and Receiving Care

ABSTRACTDrawing on a qualitative study of thirty-two women aged between 35 and 85, this paper links women's experiences of giving and receiving care in the informal sphere to their wider social and ideological context. While subjects subscribed to cultural assumptions about families, responsibility, gender and old age, they experienced awkwardness in translating them into their own lives. Younger women and women looking back on their middle years experienced contradiction between the cultural expectation that they be responsive to others and their wishes for self-enhancement. Older women experienced contradiction between the cultural imperative to be unburdensome and independent and their wish for security. Feelings of guilt and shame were associated with not living up to these expectations. They rendered subjects' concerns, individual failings and stifled expression of their needs. To facilitate such expression and work towards social policies that enhance women over the life course, it will be necessary to envision alternative types of supportive services and to challenge the ideological barriers to their use that the subjects of this study had so acutely internalised.

Explaining the Puzzles in Policy Change: Local Finance Reform in Britain

ABSTRACTThis paper compares four different theoretical accounts of the reform of British local government finance at the end of the 1980s: public choice, marxian political economy, bureaucratic process, and party politics. Five key questions are identified as the most essential and puzzling features of the change: why reform; the timing of reform and implementation; the national non-domestic rate; the choice of a poll tax; and why the ‘final solution’ of direct central control has been eschewed. The ability of each theoretical approach in answering these five key questions is then assessed in the light of what we know about the history and logic of local government finance in Britain. The conclusion is that the reform can be explained, but that no single theoretical approach can give a completely satisfactory account. Overall, a competitive party politics model, complemented by public choice ideology and bureaucratic process, gives the fullest explanation.

Public Libraries and Political Culture

The ambiguity of public library goals arises in part out of the variety of sources of public library ideology. This ideol- ogy consists of values derived from conservatism, socialism, and especially, liberalism. While this diversity of sources contributes to contradictory goals and to inherent weaknesses in some library pro- grams, it also can contribute to greater institutional flexibility and vitality, thereby enhancing the chances of institutional survival.

Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico

In the realm of public ideology, the Mexican Revolution was preceded and accompanied by an upsurge in nationalism. Intellectuals as diverse as Andres Molina Enriquez and Jose Vasconcelos denounced the sterile aping of European doctrines which had characterized the Liberal Reforma of the 1850s, in favour of measures which were based on colonial precedent. In fixing upon mestizaje as the historical mainspring of Mexican nationality, both men echoed Justo Sierra, high priest of Liberal patriotism in the Porfirian era, who had declared that 'the mestizo family ... has constituted the dynamic element in our history'.1 That both Social Darwinism and Romantic Idealism were invoked to justify these claims demonstrates how powerful was the nationalist impulse in Mexico during the first decades of this century. It fell to Manuel Gamio (1883-1960) to apply the principles of Boasian anthropology to further the same cause, albeit, in this case, by insisting on the enduring contribution of Indian civilisation to Mexico's development. As the title of his book, Forjando Patria (1916), clearly attested, Gamio welcomed the Revolution for its destruction of obstacles to the creation of 'the future nationality. ?.. the future Mexican patria'. Although he did not participate in the revolutionary struggle, he praised Pablo Gonzalez, Venustiano Carranza's lacklustre general, as 'an intuitive national? ist', and later characterised Carranza himself as 'a man of many faults, but withal a true progressive and a man of the people', clear evidence that he favoured the victory of the constitutionalist coalition over the popular forces led by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.2 In 1935 he asserted that his public goal had always been to promote 'a true, integral nationalism', thus avoiding the contemporary extremes of fascism and communism.3 To assess the significance of Gamio's contribution to the Mexican political and cultural tradition, it should be recalled that although Fray Servando Teresa de Mier and Carlos Maria de Bustamante, the chief ideologues of the 1810 Insurgency, had invoked the grandeur of Anahuac as the chief glory of their Creole patria and defined the Mexican people as a nation which had struggled for three centuries to regain its freedom, a thesis enshrined in the Act of Independence of 1821, by contrast most early nineteenth-century Mexican Liberals dismissed the Aztecs as mere barbarians and viewed contemporary Indians as a hindrance to their country's modernisation.4 In adopting this approach, they could cite Alexander von Humboldt who, in his study of Indian monuments and codices, expounded the neo-classical

Disease and Discovery: A History of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1916-1939

Institutional histories are often boring repositories of long-forgotten names and intramural developments, commissioned by well-meaning insiders to celebrate a particular anniversary. Refreshingly, Elizabeth Fee's book is neither tedious nor merely fashioned for in-house consumption. In fact, developments at the Hopkins School of Hygiene are merely a platform from which the author launches into a broad investigation of early 20th-century public health ideology in America. At a time when newspaper headlines and political rhetoric in the debate over the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) pit civil rights against public health, Fee's examination of the latter's shifting boundaries and approaches is informative. Her distinction of a medical, disease-oriented model of public health vs a social, environmental archetype is important for an understanding of the tensions and strains that still predominate in this field of study. The disease model relied heavily on the new sciences of bacteriology, medical zoology, and then virology, trying to

Skills, Control, and the Mass Professions

Since members of the mass professions are employed mainly by large organisations in the public sector, they are increasingly ‘managed’. What is happening to their skills, their control over their own work, and their professionalism, are matters of concern as revealed by recent disputes. These are precisely questions at the heart of the labour process debate relaunched by Braverman. The insights generated by this stream of writing, already profitably applied beyond blue collar work to clerical occupations may be extended to embrace elements of the service class. There the notion of indetermination goes beyond the notion of discretion. Changes in public ideology have effects analogous to those arising from technological innovation in manufacturing. Yet professionals, whilst attending to technological aspects of their work, typically ignore the wider social issues. In this respect they are vulnerable to deskilling and erosion of control over their work.

Public Opinion, Ideology, and State Welfare.

Public Opinion, Ideology, and State Welfare.

Reviews Section

Reviews Section Get access PUBLIC OPINION, IDEOLOGY AND STATE WELFARE, Peter Taylor-Gooby, London, R. K. P., 157 pp., £6.95 (Pb). POOR BRITAIN, Joanna Mack and Stewart Lansley, Allen and Unwin, 1985, 324 PP., £5.95 (Pb). Micheal Sullivan Micheal Sullivan University CollegeSwansea Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Community Development Journal, Volume 21, Issue 3, July 1986, Pages 231–233, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/21.3.231 Published: 01 July 1986

The summer people and the natives some effects of tourism in a Vermont vacation village

A village in northern New England was the setting of fieldwork focused on the interaction between the year-round residents of the community (the natives) and their tourist season guests (the summer people). The annual round of activities is geared to the the presence and absence of the summer people; the most highly valued periods of time are the winter season when only natives are residents of the village. As the marketing of the pastoral image of their village to the summer people progresses, the natives face a dilemma. If they are sucscessful in their marketing endeavors, they will prosper financially but, at the same time, they hasten the corruption of their public ideology—the image they hold of their village. The natives are attempting to salvage their future by exploiting the summer people through a “phony-folk culture” and thereby preserving selected aspects of their traditional culture for themselves. The natives' traditional way of life becomes more and more difficult to maintain as it is distorted and consumed by the summer people.

Elites, Participation, and the Democratic Creed

The primary purpose of this paper is to cast doubt on the theoretical and empirical soundness of two well-known survey studies of public opinion, ‘Consensus and Ideology in American Politics' by McClosky, and ‘Fundamental Principles of Democracy, Bases of Agreement and Disagreement’ by Prothro and Grigg. That these articles contributed to the pluralist orthodoxy of the fifties and early sixties is evident from their data and conclusions, which can be summarized as follows: (1) it cannot be claimed that the United States enjoys a wide democratic consensus; the majority of citizens exhibit only a superficial commitment to democratic norms and ideas; (2) rather, it is the social and political elites who are the main repositories of democratic virtue; therefore (3) any attempt greatly to increase popular participation would needlessly expose present institutions to authoritarian pressures. Although the past decade or so has witnessed a rehabilitation of radical democratic theory, these articles have enjoyed remarkable freedom from serious criticism. Indeed, their findings have become conventional academic wisdom. Through a detailed analysis, I attempt to demonstrate that the questionnaires used in the two investigations are both carelessly constructed and arbitrarily tied to a narrow, a historical conception of democracy. It is also argued that both studies are marred by a fundamental contradiction common (though hitherto undetected) in pluralist writing.

Rural American Community Studies: The Survival of Public Ideology

The community study is one of the major methodological traditions in American sociology and has yielded important data upon which interpretations of American society have been made. The broad range of time periods, geographic locations, and community types encompassed by the community study literature makes valuable its contribution to the ethnography of American culture.

A Method of Determining Ideological Groupings in the Congress

HE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY is to propose a method of determinI ing ideological groupings in an American legislative body, to illustrate the method by reference to the House of Representatives of the 79th Congress, and to suggest questions which this method might answer.' The argument supports the following hypotheses: 1. Some (but not necessarily all) of a legislator's roll call votes during a session (or term of office) define his public ideology for that session (or term).