Structural Contradictions Research Articles

Enhancing the Innovation Performance of Firms by Balancing Cohesiveness and Bridging Ties

This article examines how firms can construct their alliance portfolio to obtain higher rates of innovation. The study develops around the idea that cohesive and sparse relationships are at the same time structurally contradictory and functionally interdependent. Their structural contradiction lies in their illustrating opposite patterns of firm partners' interconnectedness: cohesive alliances imply that a firms' alliance partners are in turn highly connected among each other, whereas sparse alliances imply that the partners in these alliances are actually disconnected from each other. But they are functionally interdependent in that they provide different (and complementary) types of contribution to a firm's innovation performance. On the one hand, by facilitating trust building and cooperation, cohesive alliances provide a normative environment that guarantees the actual execution of knowledge recombinant processes. On the other by exposing firms to novel and varied knowledge flows, sparse alliances break the tendency of cohesive alliances to produce redundancy, and make it possible for the knowledge recombinations that take place across cohesive relationships to actually bear the fruits of innovation. By illustrating the mechanisms whereby the synergies between cohesive and sparse alliances can be obtained and exploited, this study suggests the development of a dual alliance network structure, made up of both cohesive and sparse alliances, as the normative ideal for innovation. The empirical results support this insight, showing that alliance portfolios made up of both types of alliances provide higher rates of innovation than those from either pattern alone. The article demonstrates these findings in the US mobile phone industry in the 1990s, a domain where firms engaged systematically in innovation processes and strategic alliance activities.

Maneuvering between State, Nation, and Tradition: Palestinian Women in Israel Make Creative Applications of Polygyny

This paper presents ethnographic documentations of Israeli Palestinian "women without men," who seek out married men and use the notion of polygyny to make moral sense of their non-normative heterosexual relationships. The women's presentations of self are construed against popular attitudes to polygyny as practically negligible and morally anachronistic. Following a political-economic approach to gender as constructed, historical, and embedded in multiple structures of power, the cases are interpreted as providing a lens into the structural contradictions that inform the lives of Palestinians inside Israel. It is argued that the women's uses of an explicitly traditional and patriarchal script of gender morality to legitimize lifestyles that are easily stigmatized as immoral have a quality of social poetics. These day-to-day subversions of norms expose the strategic nature of "big" power structures of state, nation, religion, and community.

E‐business and organizational change: a structurational approach

Abstract. Although e‐business is a familiar part of the organizational landscape, its implementation remains a problem for large traditional organizations. This paper argues that the pervasiveness of e‐business calls for the adoption of an organizational change perspective to study its implementation. Using structuration theory, the paper analyzes a detailed case study of the implementation of a major e‐business initiative in a traditional automotive manufacturer. It shows how a combination of structural contradictions and unexpected consequences derailed the initiative.

Virgins of Empire: The Last September and the Antidevelopment Plot

This essay argues that The Last September generates both historical meaning and stylistic originality by taking apart the basic progressive structure of the Bildungsroman. While Bowen may have imbued the novel's autumnal scene with a certain wistful appreciation for the civilization of the Anglo-Irish, the novel's plot, language, and characterization in fact tend to encode a deeper and more systematic narrative meaning in which the frozen, virginal fate of Lois Farquar indexes the structural contradictions of settler colonialism and the larger inevitabilities of postcolonial nationalism.

‘What else do we Bengalis do?’ Sorcery, overseas migration, and the new inequalities in Sylhet, Bangladesh

In Sylhet, Bangladesh, remittances sent home by sons and husbands working abroad have led to new inequalities conducive to the proliferation of sorcery accusations. In cases of illness, sorcery is often the preferred diagnosis. The virilocal rule of residence positions the son's wife as an outsider and, as such, she has been traditionally viewed as the prime suspect in cases of sorcery. This structural tension has been intensified by overseas migration as sons working abroad increase the isolation and vulnerability of their wives. Patients and their families do not passively act out structural contradictions but actively pursue a sorcery diagnosis. Through a detailed case study of one woman's struggle to come to terms with infertility, I show how a diagnosis of sorcery acts as a face‐saving mechanism in situations of material inequality between kin.

Learning in and for cross‐school working

In this study we report some of the outcomes of a study of professional learning that took place in cross school partnerships as they worked towards promoting creativity in schools. The methodology developed by Engeström and his colleagues at The Centre for Developmental Work Research in Helsinki was adopted. This form of intervention involves the preparation and facilitation of workshops in which the underlying structural contradictions that are in play in emergent activities are highlighted and articulated in such a way that participants may engage with what may otherwise remain hidden and unexamined tensions. This approach is based on the writings of the early 20th‐century Russian school of social scientists—Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. A principal claim is that the development of creativity requires tools and contexts for such innovatory forms of practice. This study suggests that this claim is a partial representation of the development of creative activity.

Resources, Power and Identities of a Hunting-gathering Society. Revisiting the Mlabri Ethnic Group in Northern Thailand

Resources, Power and Identities of a Hunter-gatherer Society. Revisiting the Mlabri Ethnic Group in Northern Thailand. Sakkarin Na Nan. This article describes the struggles of the hunter-gatherer Mlabri ethnic group in the context of spatial and symbolic enclosure. Based on a political ecology conceptual framework, the author argues that the present-day Mlabri struggle in the degraded environment of northern Thailand cannot be understood, particularly, through the linear model of human evolutionism from hunters to farmers. The article looks at the existence of the hunter-gatherer Mlabri as the result of an asymmetrical power relation in the micro-politics of a local valley of Nan province. It shows that the current transitions experienced by the hunter-gatherer Mlabri society are a microcosm of the structural contradictions of the resource management in the contemporary Thai nation-state. However, the core point of this paper is that the marginalized hunter-gatherers are not remaining under domination without any resistance. Moreover, they use several social strategies to reshape their livelihood conditions and— at the same time— to manage the complex social identities of hunter-gatherers in a globalised world.

Rapid Growth and Structural Inconsistencies in China

China has realised excellent rapid economic growth for the last 27 years following Taiwan and Korea, which maintained rapid growth for nearly 40 years. This has mainly been achieved by extraordinary high fixed assets investment, especially investment in real assets, as well as export expansion. However, new structural contradictions have emerged. They include workers laid off through downsizing of state-owned corporations, non-privileged farmers who have migrated into cities, and landless peasants. China is now at a turning point for the central government to drastically transform existing fiscal institutions in order to redistribute the dividends of high economic growth to the poor and poor areas, against the trinity of local bureaucracy, real estate developers, and state-owned banks.

The International Criminal Court and United States opposition

While the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been touted as the most fundamental development in international society to date, there has been relatively little criminological research examining the potential influence of the ICC. Additionally, criminologists have neglected the United States' responses to the ICC. Our purpose is to fill that gap by examining the United States' role in the development of, and subsequent reactions to, the ICC. Moreover, we draw upon Chambliss' Structural Contradictions Model to explicate processes within the development of International Law, thereby expanding its utility. We begin with a brief discussion of the most contentious elements of the ICC for the United States, sovereignty and jurisdiction, followed by a review of the theoretical model utilized in our analysis. We then discuss the role of the United States in the development of the ICC followed by the proceeding actions taken against the Court. We suggest how US withdrawal and legislative undermining of the ICC not only reflects the US ambiguous relationship with international law but also reveals some of the inherent limitations placed on the ICC as an international institution of formal social control. We conclude with a criminological analysis of the Court's potential based on the existing Rome Statute and the recent efforts of the U.S. to thwart its efficacy.

Policing Culture, Cultural Policing: Law and Social Order in Postcolonial South Africa

This study transgresses the received distinction between two genres: the scholarly essay and the grant proposal. An extended reflection on a research endeavor still in progress, it interrogates the methodological and conceptual questions raised, ab initio, by the effort to explore and explain an unusually perplexing phenomenon: the dramatic rise, in postapartheid South Africa, of witchcraft killings–and of their policing, both formal and informal, which has produced distinctly hybrid styles of cultural justice. Our objective is to address a number of interrelated questions concerning the description, interpretation, and analysis of (I) occult-related violence, itself legitimized locally by populist appeals to “culture” and (2) its regulation by a secular modernist state committed to, yet challenged by, the constitutional recognition of cultural difference. It is our thesis that this “epidemic” of occult-related violence, and the kinds of cultural policing that accompany it, are stark expressions of a structural contradiction within the “new” South Africa, a contradiction evinced in all postcolonies–and, increasingly, in other nation-states as well

Coteaching: from praxis to theory

We evolved coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing to respond to the need of teachers inexperienced in one or another aspect of teaching to learn to teach at the elbow of another. As our praxis of coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing unfolded, we developed a theoretical framework. In this article, we present some core theoretical ideas that go with coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing. These ideas are rooted in our reading of cultural–historical activity theory and critical psychology. The resulting framework is particularly suited for analyzing and theorizing complex practices such as teaching and learning in schools for several reasons. First, it requires us to take a first‐person perspective on the actions of individuals and groups. Second, it theorizes actions available to an individual as concrete cases of a generalized action available at the collective level. Third, we understand all actions to be mediated by the tools (language, curriculum theory), rules, community, and division of labor characteristic of the situation. Fourth, because this approach explicitly theorizes context, it is an excellent tool for articulating and removing structural contradictions. Fifth, the approach assists us in understanding the contradictions within a system in a positive way, namely as opportunities for change and growth. Finally, the framework explicitly focuses on the cultural–historical changes that individuals, their community and tools, and the reigning division of labor and rules undergo.

Anticipatory and Actualized Identities: A Cultural Analysis of the Transition from AIDS Disability to Work

Throughout the course of their lives, many people living with HIV/AIDS have prematurely retired onto AIDS disability. A new trend, however, has swept across the nation. Where once people were getting sick, leaving work, and embracing inevitable death, now, with advances in medical technology, many people with HIV/AIDS are renewing their lease on life and discovering a desire to go back to work. To learn how gay men's identities are impacted as they transition from AIDS disability back to the labor market, I conducted three months of fieldwork at an employment placement agency in San Francisco. During fieldwork I distributed informal questionnaires to 120 gay men and then formally interviewed 10 additional gay men who had either transitioned or were considering transitioning from AIDS disability back to work. Analyses reveal that cultural, structural, and medical contradictions typify the return to work. As gay men experience and live through these contradictions, their identities split into anticipatory and actualized components. By facilitating a reassessment of meanings and values, anticipatory identities cognitively and emotionally prepare individuals as they brave the road back to work. This version of identity represents a romanticized confluence of worker (role) identity, gay (status/master) identity, and overall sense of self (self-concept). Personal experiences with stigma, shame, and discrimination along with complexities of the workplace and medical services, however, prevent the maturation of anticipatory identities when seeking reemployment. This results in loosely coupled and situationally informed actualized identities. The relationship between these two identities suggests that many people living with HIV/AIDS—and indeed others who experience stressful life transitions—face complex choices between quality-of-life issues and the ability to survive according to external cultural and structural constraints.

Policing Culture, Cultural Policing: Law and Social Order in Postcolonial South Africa

This study transgresses the received distinction between two genres: the scholarly essay and the grant proposal. An extended reflection on a research endeavor still in progress, it interrogates the methodological and conceptual questions raised, ab initio, by the effort to explore and explain an unusually perplexing phenomenon: the dramatic rise, in postapartheid South Africa, of witchcraft killings–and of their policing, both formal and informal, which has produced distinctly hybrid styles of cultural justice. Our objective is to address a number of interrelated questions concerning the description, interpretation, and analysis of (I) occult-related violence, itself legitimized locally by populist appeals to “culture” and (2) its regulation by a secular modernist state committed to, yet challenged by, the constitutional recognition of cultural difference. It is our thesis that this “epidemic” of occult-related violence, and the kinds of cultural policing that accompany it, are stark expressions of a structural contradiction within the “new” South Africa, a contradiction evinced in all postcolonies–and, increasingly, in other nation-states as well

Militarized Democracies: The Neoliberal Mexican State and the Chiapas Uprising

The neoliberal state, this article argues, displays structural contradictions between the need to create stability and the demand to display democratic structures where the human rights of the citizens are respected. As the discourse of human rights is increasingly used also by marginalized groups, the apparent convergence in human rights objectives may be dangerous illusion. The last few decades, crises and the expansion of neoliberal mar ket have transformed Latin American states from reasonably sover eign, authoritarian entities to ones highly dependent on international institutions and markets. Governments have become accountable not only, or perhaps even primarily, to their citizens, but to economic global actors that impose significant restrictions on their governance (Sassen 2003). The new role of the state, as argued by Turner (2003), is to facilitate the workings of these actors, eliminating market impediments and opening the public sector for privatization. This has often led to worsened conditions for the poor, thus breaking with former implicit social contracts between centralized, cor poratist states and the national populations, which promised certain extent of material security and well-being (Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley 2003: 12 13). The Zapatista uprising is perhaps the most famous example of popular protest against the new policies, and has been followed by more massive mobi lizations in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia. However, for states, such protests imply threat to predictability and have frequently been countered by state repression. Thus, in many countries in Latin America, the last decades have involved a continuation or even increase in the use of force by the police and the military (Pereira and Davis 2000: 5). However, while states need to control political opposition, they should avoid methods that upset the international community. By the protagonists of neolib eral economy, market economy is regarded as codependent on democracy, legality and respect for human rights (Mendez 2002; Schild 1998). Thus, states have to create and maintain reputation of liberal democracy and protection of human rights.

Multiplicity or Homogeneity? The Cultural-Political Paradox of the Age of Globalization

Multiplicity or Homogeneity?The Cultural-Political Paradox of the Age of Globalization Zhang Xudong (bio) The global event of the September 11 terrorist attack on New York brings to the fore the fragility and precariousness of an inter-dependent world. In this world, the unevenness, imbalance, conflict, and above all competing claims of truth and value (or what Max Weber has called the fight among the gods [Weber 1994, 78-79])1 tend to overwhelm the so-called rationalistic order of global capitalism and liberal democracy, an order that implies an overcoming of the Hegelian-Marxian History by the Kantian ideal of "perpetual peace." In the wake of this sudden upheaval and intensity of the political ("sudden" thanks to the ruthless effort at depoliticization we have been subject to since the end of the Cold War), both traditional lib-eral and radical positions seem to have been unable (or unwilling) to come up with explanations and analyses that address the deep-seated historical origins and contexts of today's conflict. Such explanations would make September 11, in hindsight, a disaster waiting to happen and, equally important, offer an intellectual and ideological alternative to the neoconservative battle cry for the Empire and its crusade against "evil." Anyone who does not want to be forced into the bleak choice between the "end of History" (Fukuyama 1992) and "clashes of civilizations" (Huntington 1996) must engage in a critical "cognitive mapping" (Jameson 1998) of the global political and cultural-political terrain in order to understand its basic fault lines and construct new narratives of the contradictions that motivate world events. I seek to formulate a theoretical narrative by revisiting some structural and historical contradictions that tend to be concealed by the universalizing rhetoric of global capitalism as not only an economic system, but a system of production of culture and value as [End Page 30] well. These contradictions define the political nature of today's con-flict: they lay bare the ideological nature of various discourses of the universal and, paradoxically, keep the historical horizon open beyond the confines of the self-recognition, self-understanding, self-assertion, and political-discursive institutions of the bourgeois as a world-historical class. My first step is to analyze the uniformity and exclusiveness of the political and cultural-political discourse of global capitalism, a discourse that, at the level of rhetoric, unfolds in terms of difference, diversity, multiplicity, and inclusion. This is followed by an analysis of the crisis of various forms of collectivity conceived politically or culturally, which are under constant assault and deconstruction not only by the capitalist world market but, equally importantly, by the rhetoric of the rationalistic individual now understood in cultural terms (despite the atomistic-universalist allergy to any particular cultural affiliation and loyalty). In this regard, it is no exaggeration to say that the global "free rational individuals," a philosophical sublimation of the international middle class, now see themselves as something "organic," as a "community" with its own myths and romances. In the next section, I focus on the political-theological analysis of the structural contradictions and discrepancies of liberal democracy offered by Carl Schmitt as a conservative revolutionary in Weimar Germany. While guarding against the intellectual trap of a theoretical, even political, short circuit of a right-wing critique of the wishful thinking of middle-class politics with Leftist historical-critical analysis, I nonetheless find Schmitt's often penetrating insight on the political compelling. Schmitt offers a dialectical rethinking of the semi-autonomous domains of property, subjectivity, and culture (as "form of life" and as things pertaining to taste and judgment) that constitute the core values of liberalism as a universal ideology. In the last section of the article, I seek to examine the prevalent rhetoric of Empire—currently shared by both the Left and the Right—in terms of the contradictions of multiplicity and singularity, inclusion and exclusion, diversity and uniformity, and so on, that are accounted for in previous sections. Admittedly, many of my arguments are not yet fully developed conceptually but remain embedded in those narrative moments, as linkages, flights, and mediations. [End Page 31] However, this essentially narrative attempt to establish some basic parameters of a critical...

Transformações no trabalho, luta operária e desenraizamento: a reestruturação produtiva no cotidiano e nas representações de trabalhadores metalúrgicos de uma empresa da região do ABC

O artigo aqui apresentado é resultado de uma pesquisa cujo objetivo principal foi descrever e analisar as formas pelas quais a reestruturação produtiva (RP) é percebida pelos trabalhadores de um setor produtivo amplamente afetado por essas transformações. Para realizá-la optamos por um estudo de caso. Foram feitas visitas exploratórias à empresa-caso a partir das quais elaboramos diários de campo, ao que se seguiu o recolhimento de treze depoimentos de alguns dos trabalhadores. Do resultado de nossa análise podemos destacar alguns pontos: 1) A RP é compreendida de diferentes formas e acompanhada por diferentes sentimentos (que passam pelo alívio, pela necessidade de explicação, mas também pela desconfiança); 2) É possível afirmar que os operários valorizam em grande medida algumas das mudanças introduzidas; 3) A reorganização do ambiente da fábrica, acompanhada de um discurso ideológico sedutor, camufla contradições estruturais e dificulta a visibilidade dos verdadeiros determinantes da insatisfação operária. O sistema participativo parece amparado por um controle internalizado e simbólico, que provoca a ilusão de uma coincidência entre interesses operários e empresariais; 4) A RP provoca a diluição do sentimento de classe e o embotamento da comunidade operária, que por sua vez minam a resistência e reinstauram o desenraizamento do trabalhador. 5) Há diferentes modalidades de enfrentamento entre os trabalhadores, as quais parecem relacionadas à história vivenciada por cada um, especialmente no que se refere à ligação com movimentos de organização coletiva.

Teaching and Learning Design Presentations in Engineering

In courses within technical disciplines, students are often asked to give oral presentations that simulate a professional context. Yet learning to speak like a professional in this academic context is a process often laden with complications. Using activity theory and situated learning as theoretical frameworks, this article explores the teaching and learning of one of the most common oral genres in technical fields—the design presentation. A study of the teaching and learning of this oral genre in three sequential engineering design courses reveals critical academic and workplace contradictions regarding audience, identity, and structure. Results of this study show that in the teaching and learning of design presentations, audience and identity contradictions were managed by a primary deference to the academic context whereas structural contradictions were addressed by invoking both workplace and academic activity systems.

Perplexive Perspectives: The Court and Contestation in the Jacobean Masque

A radically novel mode of visual representation emerged during the Florentine Renaissance as a potent means of representing the control of spaces: linear perspective. This new representational mode was developed in the context of Florentine economic centralisation and rationalisation; it was a function of the increasingly efficient mapping and planning of urban spaces subjected to a centralised ruling 'gaze'.1 Perspective was introduced into England at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth by painters such as Isaac Oliver and other artists aware of continental trends. One avenue through which it entered the English context was via the lavish scenery created by Inigo Jones to accompany Ben Jonson's masques at court during the reign of James I (1603-1625). The Jacobean court masque, however, was a multifaceted work of art in which perspective, as one element of the theatrical ensemble, appears to have been riddled by contradictions which made it a less than assured mode of asserting spatial control. In this transitional phase, before perspective representation attained hegemonic status as a configuration of visual space, its workings were laid bare by virtue of their imperfect functioning in a specific artistic situation.Court entertainments had constituted an element of earlier royal festivities, but the masques presented to James I surpassed prior celebrations in their exorbitant expense and in their employment of technical innovations. When Ben Jonson described the opening moments of the first documented masque at the court of James I, The Masque of Blackness (1605),2 his account of the scenery attested to a struggle to express the new form of visual organisation: 'First, for the scene, was drawne a Landtschap, consisting of small woods, and here and there a void place fill'd with huntings; which falling, an artificial sea was seene to shoote forth, as if it flowed to the land, raysed with waues, which seemed to move, and in some places the billow to breake, as imitating that orderly disorder, which is common in nature' (169-70: 24-30). Jonson's use of gothic script emphasises a visual mode evidently still felt to be foreign to an English context. Closely associated with the new 'landtschap' painting was perspective representation, whose intricacies Inigo Jones had familiarised himself with during his travels in Italy.3 The court masques provided a forum in which the new visual form could be introduced to English audiences, an undertaking apparently not without difficulties.If one commentator, Peter Hausted, remarked in 1632 that this form of theatre 'freely and ingenuously labored rather to merit then ravish an Applause' through its use of visual and dramatic artifice, it is nonetheless clear that the court masque, like other royal entertainments, constituted an exercise in political persuasion.4 Perspective gave plastic expression to aspirations to absolute rule. In this article, I shall argue that perspective, as a central element of the rhetoric of royal power, was however dogged by contradictions in its inaugural phase in the English context - partly as a result of its place in an heterogeneous ensemble which also included elements stemming from older theatrical traditions; and partly as a result of anomalies inherent to the workings of perspective representation itself. Conceived as a visual mode of spatial control, the newly introduced visual form inevitably encountered considerable resistance from court spectators. The uneasy coexistence of residual and emergent regimes of visual organisation created a contradictory and unstable complex of spatial forms which resonated with power struggles at the Jacobean court. In what follows, I will deal first with the regime of control evinced in perspective's place within the Jacobean masque, as well as with the structural contradictions of such modes of politicised representation. I will then go on to examine instances of contemporaries' scepticism with regard to perspective as a visual configuration of space, and the consequences of such scepticism in the context of the court of James I. …

Ethnic Conflict in the Modern World-System: The Dialectics of Counter-Hegemonic Resistance in an Age of Transition

This article recasts debates about the extent and causes of ethnic con?ict within the world-system framework. Ethni?cation and indigenism are inherent structural contradictions of the modern world-system, and there is the highest incidence of ethnic resistance at the peak of a hegemon’s ascendancy. Consequently, there has not been a dramatic increase in ethnic con?ict since the end of the Cold War. However, ethnic mobilizations pose an increased challenge to the continued functioning of the world-system during the current age of transition. Ethnic mobilizations erode the capitalist civilizational project and increase costs to the system in ways that exacerbate the growing pro?t squeeze. I identify ?ve ways in which the counter-hegemonic mobilizations of ethnic minorities are costly to the world-system and can push it toward bifurcation and transformation.

Wage Regulation between Industrial Democracy and Market Pressures Towards a European Model?

This paper addresses the relationship between market forces and industrial democracy in the context of European integration. Given the notable imbalance between economic and socio‐political integration in the EU, one may doubt that a European system of organized industrial relations can develop. Moreover, there is the fear that economic integration in Europe may even undermine the national systems that are all strongly committed to the principles of industrial democracy. Following the distinction between system integration and social integration, this paper identifies two hypothetical explanations for the observed imbalance: (i) a structural contradiction between market‐driven performance requirements and democracy; (ii) collective‐action problems of building non‐market institutions of joint regulation. The paper empirically examines these hypotheses with regard to wage regulation. Based on these findings, the prospects for Europeanization of industrial democracy are discussed. The paper's argument is that European regulation may evolve in such a way that it transcends both Euro‐optimist and Euro‐pessimist scenarios.