Structure Of Power Relations Research Articles

Intimidation as epistemological violence against social science conservation research.

We investigated intimidation of conservation social scientists, which is ongoing and aimed at silencing or discrediting research findings. Although social scientists share with conservation biologists the desire to understand and address the biodiversity crisis, their analysis of structural power relations and contradictions in conservation is sometimes not appreciated. Intimidation can take place before and during fieldwork, during the publication process, and after publication in academic and public spheres. We examined our diverse experiences of intimidation, including legal threats, character assassination, physical threats, job exclusion, and curtailment of academic freedom. Diverse actors, including national research granting bodies, international policy makers, donors, ethics bodies, and conservation biologists and organizations, may target research that does not align with their political, economic, financial, and ideological interests. We refer to intimidating practices to suppress or alter unwelcome perspectives or research findings as epistemological violence. Tactics of epistemological violence relate to structural, systemic, symbolic, discursive, and material violence and have significant implications for understanding and improving long-term conservation. Epistemological violence can impede the progress, effectiveness, and social justness of conservation and suppress critical or differently informed perspectives crucial for a well-functioning academia. Intimidation hampers crucial collaborations among disciplines and with societal partners. Epistemological violence has detrimental consequences for affected individuals, the broader conservation community, people living in or near conservation areas, and conservation achievements.

A Conversation on Aesthetics and Affects of Power

In May 2022 we held a workshop at the University of Erfurt titled Aesthetics and Affects of Power in the Context of Religion. The workshop was born out of a shared personal interest in the implicit, unconscious, material, and embodied negotiations of power, specifically as they take place in religious fields and discourses of religious participation. We observed that religious practices and discourses have historically taken, and continue to take, an especially important role in creating sensory mechanisms that structure power relations: shaping perception via aesthetics and affects. These sensory power mechanisms outlive religious practices and expand far beyond the religious sphere. They become alive in the body of the aesthetically affected. This conversation is an attempt to approach, grasp, and frame aesthetics and affects of power as a starting point for any future exchange and discussions.

Legitimacy and women entrepreneurs in masculinised industries: a postfeminist perspective

PurposeThis paper explores the ways women entrepreneurs in male-dominated industries do identity work in order to gain legitimacy. In particular, we consider such identity work as a process being prompted by their direct environment, while demonstrating the gendered structural power relations in these women’s entrepreneurial contexts. We use a postfeminist lens to show how, in their quest for more legitimacy, they seem to be interpellated by postfeminist discourse.Design/methodology/approachWe have used a narrative approach to show how women entrepreneurs in masculinised contexts do identity work to acquire legitimacy, and moreover use a postfeminist perspective to reflect on this identity work as to demonstrate how these Dutch businesswomen consider their agency in specific feminist terms within these men-dominated industry environments.FindingsWe present empirical data of ten women entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and how they discursively and subjectively make sense of their surrounding gendered contexts, in order to illustrate how local gender regimes and individual actions may conspire to constrain as well as stimulate these women’s entrepreneurship. By reflecting on three different ways of identity work through a postfeminist lens, we show how these women are interpellated by postfeminist discourses when trying to gain legitimacy.Research limitations/implicationsThe rather small sample does not allow us to generalise our findings to the whole population of women entrepreneurs in men-dominated contexts, yet this was not our goal anyway.Practical implicationsSuch a reflection might help policy makers and such women themselves realise how, after all, gender inequality is still persistant in the entrepreneurship field and drawing on postfeminism does not necessarily help to support these women entrepreneurs' work–life balance.Social implicationsOur findings underline the importance of a more gender inclusive entrepreneurship ecosystem, in which women entrepreneurs in both masculinised ánd feminised sectors are seen and treated as legitimate entrepreneurs.Originality/valuePostfeminism, to our knowledge, has hardly been applied to women entrepreneurs' experiences in men-dominated environments, and is in itself still a rather new field in entrepreneurship studies.

Investigating the dynamics of managerial dialogue in HE merger reform

AbstractThe paper argues that the empirical study of public policy making almost exclusively deals with structural arrangements and power relations, while giving insufficient attention to how policy entrepreneurs in government develop policy initiatives through venue selection, framing, and dialogue. Drawing on insight from theories of public policymaking and organizational decision-making, public management, and on data from a case study of higher education merger reform in Norway, the article provides a conceptual and empirical contribution by suggesting the significance of managerial dialogue — highlighting a specific combination of dialogue, power asymmetries, managerialism, and venue selection as important elements in higher education reform policymaking.

Rethinking economic socialization: the intersection of culture, gender and economic life in a religious enclave

Abstract This article explores how economic socialization serves as a bridge between individual economic behaviors and the broader social and cultural contexts that shape them. Drawing on a post-functionalist approach to socialization, the study examines the ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Haredi) community in Israel, where distinct gender roles, cultural norms and patterns of economic participation create a unique context for investigating divergent economic socialization pathways. Comparing four groups within the Haredi community—average/below-average and high-income women, men with work experience, and men who study at religious seminaries (Yeshiva/Kollel)—analysis of an original survey study reveals how differential exposure to economic life leads to significant variations in financial risk-taking, loss-aversion, financial literacy and competitiveness. The findings problematize explanations attributing economic gender gaps to innate differences, instead highlighting the profound impact of the cultural framing of gender roles vis-à-vis economic integration. By foregrounding economic socialization as a sociological phenomenon, the study contributes to discourses on culture’s role in economic behavior and opens new avenues for examining how individuals acquire economic dispositions through socialization pathways shaped by structural constraints and power relations.

Post-growth agrifood systems: Towards an emancipatory politics

AbstractA world without hunger demands a post-growth rewiring of the global agrifood system predicated on emancipatory politics that enables reform of actors and institutions outside agriculture. This is necessary to shift out of the prevalent growth-hegemonic framing of agriculture and its contributions to economic growth, where the structural injustice of hunger is rendered invisible. Recent International Relations (IR) scholarship highlights the institutional arrangements underpinning global agrifood problems. This paper uses critical IR theory to understand the structural mechanisms and relations of power through which the growth-hegemonic theorisation of agriculture is produced and reproduced, sustaining hunger within an exceedingly financialised agro-industrial complex. The structural power of knowledge shaping the interlocking structures of finance, production, and security is evident in the extremely high multilevel concentration in modern agrifood systems. This structural power evident in local decentralised agroecological systems and in transnational agrarian movements reflects post-growth principles of sufficiency, shared prosperity, care, ecological and social justice.Together, they are the counter-hegemonic voices, cooperative social systems, and class interests championed by post-growth politics.

Power of economics without power in economics?

Power relations dominate most social and economic processes. Despite its significance, however, the concept of structural power relations is often neglected in standard economics. Standard economics often confines itself to dissecting an idealised, abstract world, wherein power dynamics are abstracted from and seen as somewhat outside the economic realm. But, can economics be powerful in understanding, explaining and, ideally, tackling the multiple crises of our time without embedding the concept of power in its analysis? We suggest that the lack of consideration or insufficient engagement with power-related aspects in mostly standard approaches has far-reaching implications, as policies that neglect underlying power relations are not fit to address the crisis. This collection reopens the discussion of power in economics. Building on the talks and discussions at the 2023 EAEPE Pre-Conference that was held in Leeds, UK, this collection provides scholars an outlet to shed light on power structures within their field of research to highlight the complexity and interrelation of power and economics. We also conduct a literature analysis to identify different forms and categories of power used in the mainstream and heterodox economics literature with a particular focus on the different definitions and interpretations of the concept. We get our sample from the Web of Science (WoS) category ‘Economics’ in the WoS SSCI database, from 2010 to 2024. This approach provides a roadmap to better understand the different interpretations, definitions and conceptualisations of power within current literature.

Striking the balance: ethical challenges and social implications of AI-induced power shifts in healthcare organizations

AbstractThe emergence of new digital technologies in modern work organizations is also changing the way employees and employers communicate, design work processes and responsibilities, and delegate. This paper takes an interdisciplinary—namely sociological and philosophical—perspective on the use of AI in healthcare work organizations. Using this example, structural power relations in modern work organizations are first examined from a sociological perspective, and it is shown how these structural power relations, decision-making processes, and areas of responsibility shift when AI is used. In the subsequent ethical part, opportunities for a fairer organization of work, but also dangers due to possibly changed power relations are elaborated and evaluated by presenting a realistic scenario from everyday clinical practice. After combining a proceduralist account of organizational ethics with a virtue-ethical approach, it is argued that certain organizational and character dispositions are necessary for employers and employees to meet the challenge of changing structural power relations in the future. With the same goal, a summative sociological perspective discusses challenges to workplace co-determination.

A social researcher researching social researchers – Lessons from feminist epistemologies

Qualitative research literature discusses how power shapes the interview process and the resulting data and explores the epistemic basis for interview research theoretically. However, processes of negotiating epistemic authority in the interview situation, and in data analysis, are investigated less frequently. This paper draws on 34 interviews with social science academics interested in gender, feminist and queer studies in four English universities to reflect on the epistemological challenges of researching social researchers about their work. Through this, it contributes to explorations of how, in qualitative interviewing and data analysis, we can combine a critical reading of interview data with a commitment to respondents’ accounts of their realities. I argue that Black, anti-colonial, queer, feminist epistemological approaches can be well suited to navigate this challenge. I advocate for an epistemic reflexivity that acknowledges the fluidity of speaker positions while taking structural power relations, and their effects on epistemology, seriously.

Shaping shores: An exploration of the interplay between law, spatial ontologies and the power to plan at Milnerton, Cape Town

Shaping shores: An exploration of the interplay between law, spatial ontologies and the power to plan at Milnerton, Cape Town

Similarities Across Difference: Consequences of Intersectional Sexual Stereotypes for Black and Latinx Women and Men in the United States

Complexity in the structure of power relations is a fruitful site of analysis that an intersectional framework brings to bear in articulating radical Black feminisms. The psychological literature utilizing an intersectional approach to study stereotyping has illuminated the importance of moving beyond a single-identity or single-axis lens. For instance, there is burgeoning literature showing that there are unique social categorizations and perceptions that vary by combinations of multiple group memberships (e.g., race and gender together). Further, an intersectional approach also draws attention to similarities and connections across different groups with unique relationships to systems of power and oppression. Focusing on these areas of similarities across difference provides insight into contexts that reinforce social inequality and are powerful avenues for building collective power through coalitions to address inequity. Therefore, the current investigation sought to address how Black and Latinx people in New York City discuss these sites of similarities and differences in power and privilege as they relate to their understanding of sexual stereotypes and their consequences in their everyday lives. We conducted 11 focus groups with 75 participants. Using thematic analysis, we identified four major themes highlighting shared and distinct stereotype-based experiences, including microaggressions and discrimination, double standards, interpersonal relationships, and emotional and behavioral responses. Beyond illuminating harmful consequences of sexual stereotypes, findings underscore the radical potential for achieving collective liberation by amplifying oppressed groups’ commonalities and differences simultaneously.

Health of the black population in health training: perspectives towards racial equity.

This article aims to understand the view of racial equity and the motivations for approaching the health of the black population in Collective Health, Nursing, and Medicine courses at a Brazilian public university, guided by the black perspective of decoloniality. Considering Institutional Racism, it is necessary to invest in the interfaces between the education and health sectors in the training of professionals for the Unified Health System. This is a qualitative study with an intervention-research approach, affirming a social and political commitment to transforming reality. Workshops were held with representatives of the Structuring Teaching Centers of the selected courses. The theme of the health of the black population has been elaborated in a prompt and decontextualized manner, with no reflection based on structural racism, power relations, and Brazilian socio-historical formation. This creates a distance from the guidelines proposed by the National Policy for Comprehensive Health of the Black Population. At the end of this article, perspectives are identified for the reorientation of health training, aimed at increasing democratic density and racial equity.

From Being a Workforce to Agents of Change: An Interpretive Meta-ethnography of Different Approaches to Participatory Research With Young People

A growing amount of educational research employs participatory methods in which young people actively gather and analyze data in collaboration with the investigators. Considering the diverse use of the label “participatory,” we examined participatory studies with young people to understand how researchers justify using this approach and conceptualize its purposes and goals, as well as these studies’ contributions to scholarship and youth’s civic learning. We conducted an interpretive meta-ethnography of 95 studies, identifying four distinct types of participatory studies with youth: technical, capacity building, justice-oriented, and transformative. We conclude that research that labels itself “participatory” but does not benefit the participants and their communities puts the approach’s credibility at risk. To challenge structural inequalities and power relations between participants and researchers, academic studies should better align with the transformative approach that has the potential to support youth in becoming agents of change by engaging them in self-directed civic learning and activism.

Contesting just transitions: Climate delay and the contradictions of labour environmentalism

The notion of ‘just transition’ (JT) is an attempt to align climate and energy objectives with the material concerns of industrial workers, frontline communities, and marginalised groups. Despite the potential for fusing social and environmental justice, there is growing concern that the concept is being mobilised in practice as a form of ‘climate delayism’: a problem more ambiguous than open forms of denialism as it draws in multiple and conflictual agents, practices, and discourses. Using an historical materialist framework, attentive to both energy-capital and capital-labour relations, we show how JT is vulnerable to forces and relations of climate delay across both fossil capital and climate capital hegemonic projects. We review this through an engagement with the climate obstructionism literature and the theory of labour environmentalism: the political engagement of trade unionists and workers with environmental issues. As tensions within the labour movement surface amidst the unsettling of the carbon capital hegemony, we assess the degree to which (organised) labour—as an internally differentiated, contradictory movement—is participating in climate breakdown through a ‘praxis of delay’. Trade unions and industrial workers are often implicated in resisting or undermining transitions, but this is related significantly to their structural power relations vis a vis the fossil hegemony. Notably, JT negotiations are themselves structurally embedded within the carbon capital economy. The general preferences of trade unions for social over environmental justice might be prevalent but are neither universal nor inevitable; JT is open and contested political terrain, and labour-environmental struggles remain imperative for building just energy futures.

Addressing gender in STEM classrooms: The impact of gender bias on women scientists' experiences in higher education careers in Germany

Gender bias underlying discrimination against women are particularly salient in STEM higher education. Complementing top-down measures to mitigate these issues identified in the extant literature, we aim to highlight a complementary bottom-up approach. First, to elicit gender stereotypes and gender bias in STEM, we conducted a group concept mapping (GCM) study involving women professors, teaching staff, and scientific staff from different STEM disciplines at German universities (N = 70). We first asked them to provide statements reflecting their experience in response to the following focus prompt: ‘In my career as a STEM teacher, I experienced gender issues related to:’ Experts were then asked to thematically cluster and rank the statements according to their importance and feasibility with respect to a potential pedagogical intervention that may target these issues. Findings revealed an agreement across STEM disciplines regarding stereotypical beliefs about women, heteronomous gender roles, gender workload, sexism, and structural power relations, in that they remain significant factors for hindering female success in STEM careers in higher education. Based on their experience, however, the women saw potential in working on the awareness of gender bias with pedagogical interventions in online group learning scenarios (CSCL). Statements rated most appropriate were discussed in the light of the aspects of gender bias addressed, with a specific focus on addressing them in collaborative scripts.

The gender of PrEP: Transgender men negotiating legitimacy in France

The gender of PrEP: Transgender men negotiating legitimacy in France

AI competitions as infrastructures of power in medical imaging

ABSTRACT This article examines how platform-based AI competitions structure power relations in medical imaging research. It focuses on two leading platforms, Kaggle and Grand Challenge, which provide organisational as well as infrastructural support to run AI competitions. In dialogue with critical AI and platform studies research, we investigate how such competitions are organised – under which infrastructural conditions and by whom – and how this shapes processes of model production and evaluation. To address these concerns, we have collected data from 118 medical image AI competitions on Kaggle and Grand Challenge, organised between January 2017 and May 2022. In addition, a variety of platform boundary resources – platform documentation, competition descriptions, dataset descriptions, and competition leaderboards – have been gathered. The analysis of these materials shows, first, that platforms direct the AI development process by requiring substantial financial resources, defining which institutions can host a competition and under which conditions. Second, competition organisers define dataset diversity and the generalisability of models. As most datasets are constructed with data from hospitals in North America, Western Europe and China, the application of models to different geographical contexts is potentially limited. Finally, competition participants influence model development through the institutional, demographic, and disciplinary contexts in which they operate. Overall, the examination demonstrates the importance of critically interrogating the entire medical AI research pipeline, including the definition of research problems, the construction of datasets as well as model production and evaluation.

White and gendered aesthetics and attitudes of #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking

Foodwork is a political matter, and baking is no exception. Many messages are associated with the symbolic significance of baking, such as idealised notions of white, middle-class domesticity, femininity and visibility. The rise in home-baking during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a surge in social media content, which conveys much about the different meanings ascribed to baking. Relatedly, scholarship on ‘COVID-19 foodwork, race, gender, class and food justice’ highlights that intersecting oppressions are implicated in such matters. Drawing on different lines of research that specify and address structural power relations (e.g. gendered whiteness), I analyse the aesthetics and accompanying attitudes conveyed via Instagram posts about #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking. In doing so, I draw and build on critical studies of whiteness and digital food media, and connections between consumerism and COVID-19. This work considers what such online content suggests about the relationship between a ‘feminised, white, aestheticised ethos’ and digital discourse and depictions regarding food, family, domesticity, work and rest. Consequently, this research ponders over whether the labour and framing involved in documenting #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking on Instagram reflects a neoliberal form of entrepreneurial ‘freelance feminism’, which is animated by the tension between the ‘frequently polarized figures of “the feminist” and “the housewife”’. I examine the significance of three key themes related to #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking: (1) Gendered domestic labour and digital depictions and discourses of motherhood; (2) productivity, pausing and so-called ‘soulfulness’; and (3) domestic minimalism and aesthetics of whiteness. In turn, this article critically reflects on the relationship between mediated constructions of gendered whiteness and baking, while echoing calls for more research that explicitly addresses dynamics between digital whiteness, class, aesthetics, gendered racial capitalism, foodwork, feminism and online content creation.

The Rise of the Individual Learner: Sociological Insights on the History of Student-Centred Learning

ABSTRACT Research on student-centred learning lacks analyses of sociohistorical developments. This article contributes to this niche by developing a sociologically designed draft of its major upheavals. Drawing on Foucault’s genesis of governmental rationalities, it links the emergence of educational subjectivations to processes of structural change. Within this scope, the transition from feudal to liberal and neoliberal principles led to problematisations and idealisations of heterogenous grouping in schools. As part of the differentiation of selective and integrative requirements, the school system became the central authority for the realisation of the objectives of different educational requirements. As flexibilisation paradigms gained widespread attention, personalised methods started to function as harmonisation mechanisms of competing demands. Tracing these paths provides important historical insights into the embeddedness of student-centred learning in structural power relations. In addition, these findings can clarify complex dimensions of current potentials of and challenges in individual education.

What is the Problem of Gender Inequality Represented to be in Inter-National Development Policy in Burkina Faso?

This article contributes to critical policy analysis scholarship from a post-structuralism perspective. Employing the ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR) framework, a Foucault-influenced post-structural approach, we investigate what is the problem of Gender Inequality (GI) represented to be in development in Burkina Faso. Based on systematic analysis of selected (inter)national development policy documents and in-depth stakeholder interviews, our results show two main categories of problem representations: a) local culture/ informal structures that strengthen and are strengthened by patriarchy, and b) women’s weak agency that undermine their effective participation. These problem representations are framed from two different but overlapping standpoints: rights and development. Furthermore, the informal structures are presented as the source of the problem of GI while formal structures are portrayed as the solution. The underlying assumptions ignore the gendered impacts of history, colonial legacies, the interconnectedness and often-conflicting state policies and globalisation. Consequently, the problem of GI is depoliticised, rendered local, technical, and static. This deflects responsibility in solving the problem, limits local agency and the exploration of effective cultural and bottom-up policy responses. Alternatively, GI could be represented as a problem of structural unequal power relations – rather than a simplistic blame of local culture.