Vulnerability Thesis Research Articles

The Vulnerable (M)other and the Autonomous Legal Subject: Rethinking Vulnerability in Criminal Law

AbstractIn this article I apply Fineman’s vulnerability thesis to explore the ways in which vulnerability is constructed and mobilised in a criminal law context. Using a ‘failure-to-protect’ offence as a case study reveals contemporary constructs of vulnerability as both a problem to be solved and gendered. Constructing women as pathologically vulnerable allows the state and its institutions to downplay the situational vulnerability of women, evading responsibility for tackling VAWG. Responsibilising women to manage risks to children posed by male violence requires that women undertake ‘safety work’, rendering them vulnerable to both moral and legal sanction if not performed adequately. Replacing the autonomous subject with the relationally vulnerable subject generates new understandings of the ways entwining femininity and vulnerability shores up the (male-coded) autonomous legal subject. Moreover, reconceiving vulnerability as universal reveals the potential of the vulnerable subject for a more inclusive criminal subject who is both embedded and embodied.

Vulnerability, legal need and technology in England and Wales

This paper explores legal need and legal advice in England and Wales during the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses the lens of vulnerability theory to examine the ways in which this crisis exposed pre-existing fragilities between the state and its relationship with the advice sector, and the individuals who experience social welfare problems. The paper commences by exploring Fineman’s vulnerability thesis and its application to those experiencing social welfare-related issues, as well as the vulnerability of the systems operating to give advice. The paper then considers the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact on needs, and the ability of the sector to meet these needs. Drawing on policy documents, reports and three case studies from law centres in England and Wales, it discusses the concept of legal need and the realities being experienced. These case studies assist us in being able to critically consider the topics of vulnerability, changing needs and the role that technology is, and can play during the pandemic and beyond. Lastly, the paper points to the need for a critical consideration of the sustainability and format of legal advice in addressing legal need in the post-COVID-19 landscape.

Vulnerability, context, and fear of victimization: Exploring race and ethnicity

ABSTRACTThe importance of individual- and structural-level factors in predicting fear of victimization has been a source of many empirical evaluations. Theoretical predictors that influence these associations such as those outlined in the vulnerability thesis on fear of crime regularly find that age, race, and gender are predictors of fear. We explore whether adolescent populations, not yet having internalized vulnerability, are more influenced by contextual factors. To explore this hypothesis, we employ the National Crime Victimization Survey: School Crime Supplement to examine the role of vulnerability on fear of victimization at school. Logistic regression suggests that contextual school-level factors may mediate the relationship between fear of victimization at school and individual characteristics such as age, race, and gender.

Fear and Cheating in Atlanta: Evidence for the Vulnerability Thesis

In this paper I foreground the widely reported and highly visible case of cheating in Atlanta Public Schools (APS) in order to argue that the descriptions presented in the report can be taken as providing some of the missing empirical evidence for Callahan’s (1962) Vulnerability Thesis. The thesis seeks to explain why North American (US) administrators in the early 20th century gave in to demands that had little educational merit. It was Callahan’s proposal that their vulnerability to criticism and insecurity of tenure explained a significant part of the ease with which they capitulated to administrative pressure. I propose that revisiting earlier work in education and curriculum studies to provide evidence (or comment on lack of evidence) is important for the development and health of the field. Further, I suggest that, assuming that the concept of ‘vulnerability’ will be an explicit focus of work in this century, new curriculum discourses and frameworks will have to be developed in order to better study the inter-related vulnerabilities of educators as is already occurring in other fields.

M. A. Fineman and A. Grear (eds.): Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics

The concept of vulnerability has attracted as many supporters as sceptics in academia, policy, and civil society. On the one hand, vulnerability can be seen as coextensive to the discourses of risk, increasing people’s passivity in their public life and promoting the infantilization and dependency of adults (Furedi 2008). Others invite caution and encourage awareness about the ways in which vulnerability can be colonised and appropriated by more conservative projects. Instead of justice, the response to vulnerability discourse has been stronger surveillance and control policies to ‘manage’ marginalized groups, such as sex workers and economic migrants (Munro and Scoular 2012). It is clear vulnerability has limitations and any investment with a theoretical framework should include an internal awareness of its strengths and downturns. Ann V. Murphy embraces the ethical appeal of vulnerability, but cautions on its ambivalent nature between caring and violence (Murphy 2012), elicited by metaphor of the wound in the concept. With this in mind, Fineman and Grear’s edited collection shows the versatility and applicability of this concept—both in theory and in practice—without abandoning the exercise of exploring reflectively the limitations of goals. The depth and breadth of the vulnerability thesis proposed by Martha Albertson Fineman, with whom the authors engage in a dialogue, is evident in the variety of problems addressed in this collection. Far from being a purely theoretical exercise, the authors in this collection show how concrete demands for justice can be articulated and applied through the vulnerability thesis. They do so by responding to Fineman’s proposal to move away from the universal rational being as the legitimate bearer of rights and replacing it with an understanding of universal vulnerability. The contributions engage directly with the main core ideas of vulnerability. They approach them practically, critically reviewing housing law, animal rights, human

Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalization and Co-Symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject

This chapter offers a reflection upon the location of the vulnerable subject of Fineman's vulnerability thesis. It offers a critical engagement with the 'double-exisions' of body and context which found the liberal legal order, focusing upon the implications of embodiment and context, locating the vulnerable subject within the conditions of advanced neoliberal globalisation, and reflecting upon the implications of unevenness and Radhakrishnan's notion of co-symptomaticity for the vulnerability thesis.

The vulnerability thesis: interest group influence and institutional design

Where politics is dominated by two large parties, as in the United States, politicians should be relatively immune to the influence of small groups. Yet narrow interest groups often win private benefits against majority preferences and at great public expense. Why? The is that the electoral system is largely to blame, making politicians in two-party systems more vulnerable to interest group demands than politicians in multiparty systems. Political scientist Lorelei Moosbrugger ranks democracies on a continuum of political vulnerability and tests the thesis by examining agrochemical policy in Austria, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and the European Union.

How Far Towards Equality' A Vulnerabilities Approach to the Rights of Disabled People

This paper will explore the application of Fineman's vulnerability thesis in the context of the barriers to participation experienced by disabled people. It will address three central issues: 1. The role of the State in promoting the substantive equality of disabled citizens 2. The potential of the vulnerability thesis in bridging the gap between positive and negative rights 3. A holistic approach to disability discrimination based on vulnerability theory In particular, this paper will focus on the multi-faceted nature of discrimination and analyse Fineman's guidance on how the State might redress this through investigating the systemic reasons for disadvantage and exclusion. It will also consider the effectiveness of providing legal remedies based on the vulnerabilities of individuals (assessed through environmental, social and cultural factors) rather than based on membership of a particular minority group.

Race and exits from white collar jobs: Differences in downward mobility processes among African American, Latino, and White males

Does race affect the route to downward mobility from white collar occupations? Data from Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to assess the minority vulnerability thesis, which maintains there are race-specific processes of down ward occupational mobility among males from white collar occupations. Findings indicate that, consistent with theory, a racialized continuum exists across six years of the work-career. For Whites, the path to downward mobility is relatively narrow and structured by traditional stratification-based causal factors, namely, human capital, back ground socioeconomic status, and job/labor market characteristics. For African Americans, the route to downward mobility is broad-based and not captured by traditional stratification factors and Latinos occupy an intermediate ground between Whites and African Americans. Further, as predicted by theory, the racial gap in mobility processes between Whites and racial minorities is pronounced at the lower-tier of white collar employment. Finally, implications of the findings for understanding labor market inequalities on the basis of race are discussed.

Downward Mobility of Women from White‐Collar Employment: Determinants and Timing by Race

This study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to assess the minority vulnerability thesis, which maintains there are racial differences among women in the determinants of, and timing to, downward mobility from white‐collar employment. In accord with the theory, a racialized continuum emerges along both issues. The route to downward mobility for African Americans is relatively broad based and unstructured by traditional stratification‐based causal factors, that is, human capital, background socioeconomic status, and job/labor‐market characteristics, and they are quickest to experience downward movement. The route to downward mobility for whites is relatively narrow and structured by stratification‐based causal actors, and they are the slowest to experience downward movement. Along both issues, Latinas occupy an intermediate position between African Americans and whites. Implications of the findings for understanding of racial inequality in white‐collar employment are discussed.

Race and downward mobility from privileged occupations: African American/White dynamics across the early work-career

In the context of the minority vulnerability thesis, this study assesses whether there are racial differences in the prevalence, determinants, and timing of downward mobility from managerial/executive and professional/technical occupational categories during the critical early career years. Findings from a panel study of income dynamics sample of men support theory: African Americans, compared to Whites, have a greater incidence of downward movement, face a route to downward movement that is less strongly predicted by traditional stratification-based causal factors, and experience mobility quickly. Analyses also reveal that racial gaps in downward mobility along lines enunciated by theory are greater in the private sector than the public sector. Implications of the findings for understanding evolving patterns of racial inequality in privileged occupations are discussed.

Vulnerability and Human Rights (review)

Reviewed by: Vulnerability and Human Rights Sophie Oliver, Ph.D. (bio) Bryan S. Turner , Vulnerability and Human Rights ( University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 156, ISBN O-271-O27923-4. Vulnerability and Human Rights is the first offering in a series entitled Essays on Human Rights, edited by Thomas [End Page 218] Cushman. The overarching aim of the series is to provide a collection of interdisciplinary, universally accessible yet theoretically provocative approaches to human rights. Bryan S. Turner's contribution offers a self-critical sociological approach. The first two chapters of the book serve to set the theoretical groundwork for, later, more applied analyses of specifically relevant "embodied" human rights issues, namely, cultural rights, reproductive and sexual rights, disability rights and bioethics. While a number of theoretical propositions are explored, the central and most provocative thesis relates to the notion of vulnerability—corporeal, moral and institutional—as the basis of a common human ontology through which human rights may be defined and defended. Criss-crossing with this central proposition are various parallel discussions of key topics including cultural relativism, citizenship, contributory rights, the body in society and cosmopolitanism. Recalling through these debates positions developed in his earlier works, Turner offers the reader a concise yet wide-ranging introduction to a number of vital challenges in human rights discourse today. The first three chapters of the book appear as the most valuable in terms of proposing a provocative and fertile theoretical position in relation to human rights—something that, according to Turner, sociology has so far failed to supply. Turner's explicit aim to think a normative sociology of human rights is coupled with criticisms of the cultural relativism of standard sociological or anthropological contributions to the field. Following Michael Ignatieff, Turner equates cultural relativism with "epistemological disinterest" and "ethical detachment" and seeks in this study to provide an alternative sociological response by means of a turn to critical recognition theory and what he terms "cosmopolitan virtue." Drawing on Habermasian communicative rationality and the Hegelian ethics of mutual recognition, Turner's alternative calls for mutual reflection and criticism, allowing for judgement and non-consensus while at the same time implying a duty of care and respect to other people and their cultures. The notion of a common human vulnerability and the minimalist ontology of human rights this implies return as central to Turner's reflections here, since it is the concept of embodied commonality that, he claims, renders most convincing the notion of cosmopolitan virtue as a duty of recognition towards the other. Human vulnerability for Turner is multi-dimensional, and while much of his discussion focuses on the frailty of the body, a further aspect figures prominently and has significant implications for the human rights regime; namely, the notion of "institutional precariousness." According to Turner, it is the inherent vulnerability of human beings that obliges us to form collective arrangements and create social structures—including human rights mechanisms— in response to potential threats; yet, he asserts, these institutions are themselves fragile when they fail to modernise, or when, enacting the Hobbesian paradox, they come themselves to pose a threat to human welfare. While Turner is right to highlight this general precariousness of human institutions, he overlooks—when he attributes to human rights the unhindered ability to place a check on state power—the possibility that the rights regime itself may in the wrong hands become a tool of abuse. There are, of course, a number of problems with the vulnerability thesis, which Turner attempts to address. Two crucial objections emerging from the liberalist perspective relate, on the one hand, to the relevance, or not, of the [End Page 219] vulnerability argument for civil and political rights, and, on the other hand, to the potentially negative repercussions of the general sociological standpoint, which privileges causality over free will. Turner responds convincingly to these criticisms, highlighting through his discussion of reproductive health and disability rights, both the interdependence of economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political rights, and the potential for free will and individual responsibility to be exercised within a set of preconditions or decision-making contexts. A further objection to the vulnerability thesis, which...

Chimeric governance and the extension of resource regulation

The contemporary securitisation of underdevelopment is based on the myth of mutual vulnerability—the idea that underdevelopment and state failure pose diverse threats both to the developed world and the poor in the developing world. The mutual vulnerability thesis provides the rationale for an attempt to expand the range of both military and regulatory interventions inside the developing world. The promise of these interventions is of a synthesis between security for the developed world and solidarism with the poor. The reality is a form of chimeric governance which purports to protect the rich from a range of imagined threats and which masks an unwillingness to really address the problems of the poor. One illusion has been shattered on 11 September: that we can have the good life of the West irrespective of the state of the rest of the world…. Once chaos and strife have got a grip on a region or a country trouble will soon be exported. Out of such regions and countries come humanitarian tragedies, centres for trafficking in weapons, drugs and people, havens for criminal organisations, and sanctuaries for terrorists…. The dragon's teeth are planted in the fertile soil of wrongs unrighted, of disputes left to fester for years, of failed states, of poverty and deprivation.1 America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing states.2 Fragile states … are a threat to the national security of the United States … the danger they are posing is unparalleled. Absent responsible state authority, threats that would and should be contained within a country's borders now melt into the world and wreak untold havoc. Weak and failing states serve as global pathways that facilitate the spread of pandemics, the movement of criminals and terrorists, and the proliferation of the world's most dangerous weapons'.3

Race and Loss of Privilege: African American/White Differences in the Determinants of Job Layoffs From Upper-Tier Occupations

Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics supports predictions from the minority vulnerability thesis concerning the determinants of job layoffs among African Americans and Whites who work in upper-middle-class occupations. Specifically, after controlling for seniority, layoffs for African Americans are relatively unstructured by traditional stratification-based causal factors, namely, background socioeconomic status, human-capital credentials, and job/labor market characteristics. Analyses also indicate that racial differences in the determinants of layoffs are more pronounced in nonservice-based than service-based firms in the private sector and in the private sector relative to the public sector.

Influence of Callahan's vulnerability thesis on Thought and Practice in Educational Administration, 1962 to 1992

This discussion of the influence of Callahan's vulnerability thesis on thought and practice-primarily in the shaping of school administration and, resultantly, its influence on thought and practice in other disciplines-is the result of extensive historical research. Spanning three decades, this research involves an exhaustive analytical examination of numerous works in which Callahan's thesis was cited. Also, interviews were conducted with some of Callahan's prominent colleagues and students, as well as with devotees of the vulnerability thesis.

Callahan's vulnerability thesis and "dissatisfaction theory"

(1996). Callahan's vulnerability thesis and 'dissatisfaction theory' Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 110-119.

Viability of the vulnerability thesis

(1996). Viability of the vulnerability thesis. Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 96-109.

Vulnerability of Humankind

Up until this point, much has been said about the lessons to be learned from Callahan's (1962) Education and the Cult of Efficiency. It has been suggested that there is a lot to be learned from that work and a lot yet to be learned. Further, it can be claimed that some of what was learned was a latent function (Merton, 1968) of what Callahan had intended. The general theme that has run throughout this issue is that Callahan was correct about the influence of business valuing in the American culture and its effect on public education. That influence has been considerable, and sometimes to the detriment of quality in education. Still there were other lessons learned that may have altered school administration in a mischievous manner. Prime among these is the pity the poor superintendent notion, growing out of the vulnerability thesis. It too often has prevented courageous action that might have proven successful in creating truly world class public education in

Vulnerability of the vulnerability thesis

Vulnerability of the vulnerability thesis

Reconsidering the Power of the Superintendent in the Progressive Period

Raymond E. Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency advanced the widely accepted notion about superintendents being extremely vulnerable to myriad pressures and criticisms of various special interest groups. To test this vulnerability thesis, we followed the career path of a single school executive in three cities between 1914–1922. As an active and long-time influential member of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association, Ernest Clark Hartwell typified a stalwart, modern-day, career-bound superintendent who consistently controlled school affairs during his administration. More than merely surviving as a school executive, he built an educational empire by aligning himself with managerial elites and fellow career-bound superintendents. In our study of this first-generation progressive, we show how he won the right to dominate the affairs of schools, systematically applied a business ethos to his work, adopted antilabor practices to dash militant teachers’ hopes for democratic control, and enlarged a state-sanctioned school bureaucracy to shield himself from public criticism in different institutional settings.