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Social Actors (social + actor)
Selected AbstractsIncomplete Citizens: Changing Images of Post-Separation ChildrenTHE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 6 2004Felicity Kaganas The image of the child as the victim of separation or divorce is well-established in legal, socio-legal and popular discourse. However, the authors argue, alongside this traditional image of the child, there is a different image of the child emerging, that of the autonomous, responsible child. This is apparent in academic discourse, policy documents and legal pronouncements. This child is included in the project of ,remoralising' the family by building the ,good' post-separation family. The ,good' child of separation or divorce is responsible for safeguarding his or her own welfare and is expected to make those choices that are assumed to best protect his or her best interests. In order to ensure that the child makes the ,right' decisions, he or she, like the adults concerned, is the target of education, information and therapeutic intervention. There is a blending of paradigms in which the ideal child is both an autonomous social actor and a vulnerable object of concern. [source] State,society relations in contemporary Vietnam: An examination of the arena of youthASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 3 2006Phuong An Nguyen Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of the relations between youth and the socialist state in contemporary Vietnam, which sheds light on the wider state,society relations. Amid rapid social changes brought about by economic liberalisation, the Vietnamese Communist Party and socialist state may no longer be the sole driving force that motivates young people. As they seek to be both in control of and in touch with youth, the leaders of the Party and state find themselves negotiating between maintaining their ideological integrity and accommodating the changing needs and desires of youth. An analysis of recent events demonstrates that youth are no longer merely a subject of political propaganda and mass mobilisation, but instead they have evolved to become an important social actor urging the leadership to further reform itself. As young people express a desire to embrace socioeconomic and cultural changes wrought by processes of marketisation and globalisation, the Party and state are actively reforming themselves not only to respond to young people's desires and aspirations, but also to strengthen their political authority and leadership, and to consolidate their control and management of youth amid the new conditions of a market-oriented society. Overall, this paper sheds light on the changes in what is considered to be the ,strategic' relationship between the state and youth, and the wider process of sociopolitical transformation in present-day Vietnam. [source] Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan IntentCONSTELLATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY, Issue 4 2003Ulrich Beck In this article I want to outline an argument for a New Critical Theory with a cosmopolitan intent. Its main purpose is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning society and politics. This belief is the notion that "modern society" and "modern politics" are to be understood as society and politics organized around the nation-state, equating society with the national imagination of society. There are two aspects to this body of beliefs: what I call the "national perspective" (or "national gaze") of social actors, and the "methodological nationalism" of scientific observers. The distinction between these two perspectives is important because there is no logical co-implication between them, only an interconnected genesis and history. [source] National Adoption of International Accounting Standards: An Institutional PerspectiveCORPORATE GOVERNANCE, Issue 3 2010William Judge ABSTRACT Manuscript Type: Empirical Research Question/Issue: Effective corporate governance requires accurate and reliable financial information. Historically, each nation has developed and pursued its own financial standards; however, as financial markets consolidate into a global market, there is a need for a common set of financial standards. As a result, there is a movement towards harmonization of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) throughout the global economy. While there has been considerable research on the effects of IFRS adoption, there has been relatively little systematic study as to the antecedents of IFRS adoption. Consequently, this study seeks to understand why some economies have quickly embraced IFRS standards while others partially adopt IFRS and still others continue to resist. Research Findings/Results: After controlling for market capitalization and GDP growth, we find that foreign aid, import penetration, and level of education achieved within a national economy are all predictive of the degree to which IFRS standards are adopted across 132 developing, transitional and developed economies. Theoretical/Academic Implications: We found that all three forms of isomorphic pressures (i.e., coercive, mimetic, and normative) are predictive of IFRS adoption. Consequently, institutional theory with its emphasis on legitimacy-seeking by social actors was relatively well supported by our data. This suggests that the IFRS adoption process is driven more by social legitimization pressures, than it is by economic logic. Practitioner/Policy Implications: For policy makers, our findings suggest that the institutional pressures within an economy are the key drivers of IFRS adoption. Consequently, policy makers should seek to influence institutional pressures that thwart and/or enhance adoption of IFRS. For executives of multinational firms, our findings provide insights that can help to explain and predict future IFRS adoption within economies where their foreign subsidiaries operate. This ability could be useful for creating competitive advantages for foreign subsidiaries where IFRS adoption was resisted, or avoiding competitive disadvantages for foreign subsidiaries unfamiliar with IFRS standards. [source] Trajectories for Greening in China: Theory and PracticeDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2006Peter Ho This edited volume argues that China's development poses the greatest ever environmental challenge for the modern world in terms of speed, size and scarcity. The volume is organized around the greening of the Chinese state and society: can the inclusion of sustainable development principles into governance, management and daily practices by social actors lead to sustainable development per se? This introduction sketches the different scholarly camps around greening and sustainable development, ranging from sceptical to radical environmentalism. The contributions demonstrate that China is showing clear signs of greening as new institutions and regulations are created, environmental awareness increases and green technologies are implemented. However, the question remains whether this is sufficient to effectuate long-term sustainable development. The key factors here are the sheer speed of China's economic growth, the size of its population, and the relative scarcity of its natural and mineral resources. Chinese development presents compelling reasons for rethinking the viability of greening. It is necessary to move beyond both alarmist visions of an environmental doomsday, and optimistic notions that incremental changes in technology, institutions and lifestyles are sufficient for sustainability. It might be more fruitful , and not only for China , to consider ,precautionary' rather than ,absolute' limits to growth. [source] Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production: Nature-based Conflicts in R7iacute;o San Juan, NicaraguaDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2000Anja Nygren This article focuses on local processes and global forces in the struggle over the fate of forests and over the contested claims of protection and production in a protected area buffer zone of Río San Juan, Nicaragua. The struggle over control of local natural resources is seen as a multifaceted process of development and power involving diverse social actors, from agrarian politicians and development agents to a heterogeneous group of local settlers, absentee cattle raisers, timber dealers, transnational corporations, and non-governmental organizations. The initial interest is in the local resource-related discourses and actions; the analysis then broadens to include the larger political-economic processes and environment-development discourses that affect the local systems of production and systems of signification. The article underlines environmental resource conflicts as one of the major challenges in subjecting structures of social power to critical analysis. [source] Development Discourses and Peasant,Forest Relations: Natural Resource Utilization as Social ProcessDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2000Anja Nygren This article analyses the changing role of forests and the practices of peasants toward them in a Costa Rican rural community, drawing on an analytical perspective of political ecology, combined with cultural interpretations. The study underlines the complex articulation of local processes and global forces in tropical forest struggles. Deforestation is seen as a process of development and power involving multiple social actors, from politicians and development experts to a heterogeneous group of local peasants. The local people are not passive victims of global challenges, but are instead directly involved in the changes concerning their production systems and livelihood strategies. In the light of historical changes in natural resource utilization, the article underlines the multiplicity of the causes of tropical deforestation, and the intricate links between global discourses on environment and development and local forest relations. [source] Diversified Agriculture, Land Use, and Agrofood Networks in Hawaii,ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 1 2002Krisnawati Suryanata Abstract: Agriculture dominated the culture and economy of Hawaii until the mid-twentieth century, but has since been in a prolonged state of decline. This article examines strategies in Hawaii's diversified agriculture that seek to revitalize its agrarian sector and the difficult challenges these efforts face within the globalized agrofood systems. Drawing from the actor-network perspective, this article suggests an alternative approach to developing Hawaii's diversified agriculture. Networks of social actors that include growers, processors, gourmet chefs, retailers, and consumers have been able to create viable diversified agriculture in spite of the globalized agrofood systems. The article then discusses how the politics of land use and land development could condition Hawaii's ability to build networks that are critical to the maintenance of a diversified agricultural sector. [source] Stabilizing flows in the legal field: illusions of permanence, intellectual property rights and the transnationalization of lawGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2003Paul Street In this article I examine some of the problems that ,modern' legal theory poses for a consideration of the extended reach of social actors and institutions in time and space. While jurisprudence has begun to engage with the concept of globalization, it has done so in a relatively limited manner. Thus legal theory's encounters with highly visible transnational practices have, for the most part, resulted not in challenging the prevailing formal legal paradigm, but in a renewed if slightly modified search for a general jurisprudence that ultimately takes little account of the manner in which the work of law is carried out transnationally. In the first part of this article I examine how legal theory's concern to maintain its own integrity places limitations on its ability to examine the permeability of social boundaries. In the latter part I draw on critical human geography, post,structuralism and actor,network theory (ANT), to examine the manner in which transnational actors have been able to mobilize law, and in particular intellectual property rights (IPRs), as a necessary strategy for both maintaining the meanings of bio,technologies through time and space, and enrolling farmers into particular social networks. [source] Understanding the design of information technologies for knowledge management in organizations: a pragmatic perspectiveINFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNAL, Issue 2 2007Tom Butler Abstract., Researchers report mixed findings on the successful application of information technologies (IT) for knowledge management (KM). The primary difficulty is argued to be the use of information management techniques and concepts to design and develop KM Tools. Also problematic is the existence of a multiplicity of KM technologies, the application and use of which differs across organizations. This paper argues that these problems stem, in part, from the information system field's over-reliance on design concepts from the functionalist paradigm. Hence, our contention that alternative perspectives, which bring into focus issues of ontology and epistemology, need to be brought to bear in order to understand the challenges involved in the design and deployment of IT artefacts in knowledge management systems (KMS). The philosophy of technology, with its emphasis on the primacy of praxis, and which incorporates ontological and epistemological concepts from phenomenology and hermeneutics, is applied to the findings of a participative action research study to illustrate how social actors interpret and understand worldly phenomena and subsequently share their knowledge of the life-world using IT. The outcome of this marriage of situated practical theory and philosophy is a set of design principles to guide the development of a core KM Tool for KMS. [source] From Habermas's communicative theory to practice on the internetINFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNAL, Issue 4 2003Michael S. H. Heng Abstract., Communication plays a crucial role in influencing our social life. However, communication has often been distorted by unequal opportunities to initiate and participate in it. Such conditions have been criticized by Habermas who argues for an ideal speech situation, i.e. a situation of democratic communication with equal opportunities for social actors to communicate in an undistorted manner. This ideal situation is partially being realized by the advent of the internet. The paper describes how an internet-based tool for collaborative authoring was conceptualized, developed and then deployed with Habermas's Critical Social Theory as a guiding principle. The internet-based electronic forum, known by its acronym GRASS (Group Report Authoring Support System), is a web tool supporting the production of concise group reports that give their readers an up-to-date and credible overview of the positions of various stakeholders on a particular issue. Together with people and procedures, it is a comprehensive socio-technical information system that can play a role in resolving societal conflicts. A prototype of GRASS has been used by an environmental group as a new way in which to create a more equal exchange and comparison of ideas among various stakeholders in the debate on genetically modified food. With the widespread use of the internet, such a forum has the potential to become an emergent form of communication for widely dispersed social actors to conduct constructive debate and discussion. The barriers to such a mode of communication still remain , in the form of entrenched power structures, and limitations to human rationality and responsibility. However, we believe that the support provided by the comprehensive system of technological functionality as well as procedural checks and balances provided by GRASS may considerably reduce the impact of these obstacles. In this way, the ideal speech situation may be approximated more closely in reality. [source] An institutional perspective on developing and implementing intranet- and internet-based information systemsINFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNAL, Issue 3 2003Tom Butler Abstract. ,This paper adopts a constructivist, case-based research strategy to examine the development and implementation of intranet- and internet-based information systems (IS) in a single organization. Institutional theory is used to describe, explain and understand the commitments of social actors in the development of web-based IS. The findings illustrate that: (1) social and organizational problems similar to those that beset ,traditional' IS development arise in the development and implementation of web-based IS; (2) ,top-down' development and implementation strategies give rise to more conflict and change management problems than ,bottom-up' approaches; and (3) fostering high levels of commitment to organizational imperatives is key to the successful development and implementation of web-based IS. [source] Globalisation of consciousness and new challenges for international social workINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 1 2003Nader Ahmadi Although the notion of international social work is not new, it is only in recent times that its central premises have been in focus. Considering diverse ongoing globalisation processes and in regard to the weakening of the national welfare state, social work must tackle the challenge of redefining its role and mission if it is to remain true to its professional commitments. The emergence of new global regions and the globalisation of local social problems make the consolidation of democracy and human rights, the prevention of conflicts and the promotion of solidarity and peace through global cultural integration some of the main concerns of international social work. In this article, international social work is discussed as a project of partnership between diverse social actors such as practitioners, universities and local governments cooperating beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. [source] Some Structural Effects of Migration on Receiving and Sending CountriesINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 5 2000Daničle Joly Traditionally, the question of migration has been compartmentalized analytically between, on the one hand, the causes of international migration which in the main have been studied by economists and geographers and, on the other hand, the consequences of migration primarily on the receiving countries, which has mostly been an area of concern for sociologists, demographers and geographers who have looked into theories and processes of settlement/integration. The twain rarely met. As a consequence, for heuristic purposes a separation based on discipline, geographical areas and objects of study has taken place, an approach challenged recently by some scholars. This article brings together the threads of international migration in its causes and consequences affecting both sending and receiving countries as well as the migrants. The close interaction between causes and consequences is enhanced by the role of migrants themselves. Indeed, migrants are not only objects whose moves are deterministically conditioned by structural factors, they are social actors who formulate their own strategies and life projects within given settings and conflicts in their society of origin and society of reception, which they in turn contribute to modify. [source] Norm Collision: Explaining the Effects of International Human Rights Pressure on State BehaviorINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2004Sonia Cardenas Scholars have offered several types of explanations regarding how international human rights pressure can shape state behavior. Some of these explanations are rationalist-materialist in orientation, emphasizing realist notions of power or neoinstitutionalist concerns with self-interest. Others have drawn on ideational-constructivist accounts to emphasize the role of norms, identity, and social actors. Additionally, scholars have paid attention to how international and domestic factors, sometimes in interaction, mediate human rights change. This essay surveys this literature, noting a trend toward theoretical synthesis; it also draws on insights from quantitative research and comparative politics to account for persistence in human rights violations and, more specifically, the timing of policy successes and failures. [source] Points of View, Social Positioning and Intercultural RelationsJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 1 2010GORDON SAMMUT The challenge of intercultural relations has become an important issue in many societies. In spite of the claimed value of intercultural diversity, successful outcomes as predicted by the contact hypothesis are but one possibility; on occasions intercultural contact leads to intolerance and hostility. Research has documented that one key mediator of contact is perspective taking. Differences in perspective are significant in shaping perceptions of contact and reactions to it. The ability to take the perspective of the other and to understand it in its own terms is a necessary condition for successful intergroup outcomes. This paper sheds light on the processes involved in intercultural perspective taking by elaborating the notion of the point of view based on social representations theory. The point of view provides a theory of social positioning that can analyse cultural encounters between social actors, and identify the conditions for positive relations. Insights are drawn from a study of public views on the relative merits of science and religion, following a documentary by Richard Dawkins in which it was suggested that religion is a source of evil. The findings demonstrate that the point of view may be categorised according to a three-way taxonomy according to the extent to which it is open to another perspective. A point of view may be monological,closed to another's perspective entirely, dialogical,open to the possibility of another perspective while maintaining some percepts as unchallengeable, or metalogical,open to another's perspective based on the other's frame of reference. [source] The Analysis of the Borders of the Social World: A Challenge for Sociological TheoryJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 1 2005GESA LINDEMANN ABSTRACT:In order to delimit the realm of social phenomena, sociologists refer implicitly or explicitly to a distinction between living human beings and other entities, that is, sociologists equate the social world with the world of living humans. This consensus has been questioned by only a few authors, such as Luckmann, and some scholars of science studies. According to these approaches, it would be ethnocentric to treat as self-evident the premise that only living human beings can be social actors. The methodological consequence of such critique is a radical deanthropologization of sociological research. It must be considered an open question whether or not only living human can be social actors. The paper starts with a discussion of the methodological problems posed by such an analysis of the borders of the social world, and presents the results of an empirical analysis of these borders in the fields of intensive care and neurological rehabilitation. Within these fields it must be determined whether a body is a living human body or a symbol using human body. The analysis of these elementary border phenomena challenges basic sociological concepts. The relevant contemporary sociological theories refer to a dyadic constellation as the systematic starting point of their concept of sociality. The complex relationship between at least two entities is understood as the basis of the development of a novel order that functions as a mediating structure between the involved parties. Based upon empirical data, I argue that it is necessary to change this foundational assumption. Not the dyad but the triad must be understood as the foundational constellation. This implies a new understanding of the third actor, which is distinct from the concepts developed by Simmel and Berger and Luckmann. [source] Social Presence and Children: Praise, Intrinsic Motivation, and Learning With ComputersJOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 1 2004Cheryl Campanella Bracken The computers are social actors (CASA) paradigm asserts that human computer users interact socially with computers, and the paradigm has provided extensive evidence that this is the case for adults. This experiment examined whether or not children have similar reactions to computers by comparing children's predictable responses to praise from a teacher to their responses to praise from a computer. Eight- to 10-year-old participants (N= 42) received either praise or neutral feedback from a computer. Independent variables were the feedback (praise or neutral), and participants' age and gender. Dependent variables measured via a paper-and-pencil questionnaire were learning (recall and recognition memory), perceived ability, and intrinsic motivation. Results provide evidence that children do have social responses to computers and that such social responses can lead to increases in learning (recall and recognition) in young children. [source] On Utopias and Dystopias: Toward an Understanding of the Discourse Surrounding the InternetJOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2001Dana R. Fisher It is clear that the Internet has the capacity to change how individuals interact with others as well as increase access to information. Whether either one of these factors affects the social landscape has yet to be determined. This fact has not kept many from anticipating the effects of the technology on society. In this paper, we contextualize some of the main issues of discussion regarding the Internet, describing these positions in terms of utopian and dystopian perspectives. By resurrecting William Ogburn's theory of the cultural lag (1964), we present a framework for understanding the extreme responses to the technology. The lag suggests that the effects of a technology will not be apparent to social actors for some time after it is introduced to a society. As such, much of the discourse concerning the Internet is ideologically charged, filled as much with the hopes and fears of individual authors as with the reality of the medium's effects. [source] Changing Definitions of Risk and Responsibility in French Political ScandalsJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2002Violaine Roussel In the 1990s in France, a large number of political scandals developed and many political actors were prosecuted. This process of making politicians responsible related, in particular, to the rise of ,new risks' regarding public health and security. In this paper, I analyse the diffusion and the crystallization of discourses linking public risk and political responsibility. First, I point to some of the social and cognitive bases in which the recent uses of the notions of risk and responsibility are rooted. Second, I focus on the mechanisms through which the notions were mobilized and invested with new definitions in the course of the scandal hearings. Third, I explore some of the effects of the changes which occurred during the 1990s: new perception frames in terms of risk and responsibility are consolidated and are progressively appropriated by social actors located in various professional spheres. [source] The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan MarketJOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2000Brigittine M. French This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particular type of discourse, the genre of bargaining. It also investigates marketers' uses of that discourse as facilitating a process of negotiating their identities as social actors. The article examines, first, how the invocation of the genre of bargaining orders marketers' speech into a stable and coherent discourse; second, how the genre's connections with social, ideological, and political-economic relations invest marketers' speech with pre-established associations; and third, how marketers may manipulate social and ideological associations established by past conventions in order to negotiate the social value of their identities at present. [source] Labour Party: saved by the modernisers or modernised to be saved?JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2003Christos Rantavellas Abstract The paper treats politics as a complex process that embraces actual or potential interactions among constructed meanings of different social actors through various symbolic forms drawing on the specific socio-historical, political context. These symbolic forms can take the form of various kinds from everyday linguistic utterances to complex images and texts. It is suggested that there is a strong interrelationship between ,image' and political discourse and their symbolic value grows as long as they come from consistent communication among all the social actors participating in the political process inside and outside of the political organisation. Two historical examples from the British political landscape,the Labour election defeat in 1987 and the Labour leadership election in 1994,are examined so as to draw some useful remarks concerning the limitations in drawing the line between ,image' and political discourse and among processes considered either internal or external of the party. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications [source] In other words: Language mixing, identity representations, and third space1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2008Rakesh M. Bhatt This paper analyzes the use of Hindi in English newspapers in India to argue that code-switching creates a discursive space , a third space (Bhabha 1994) , where two systems of identity representation converge in response to global-local tensions on the one hand, and dialogically constituted identities, formed through resistance and appropriation, on the other. The results of the analysis of data show that code-switching: (1) reflects a new socio-ideological consciousness; (2) yields a new way to negotiate and navigate between a global identity and local practices; and (3) offers a new linguistic diacritic for class-based expressions of cultural identity. Based on these results, I conclude that code-switching, as linguistic hybridity, is a third space where social actors (re-)position themselves with regard to new community-practices of speaking, reading, and writing. It is in this space that actors are presumed to have the capacity to synthesize, to transform: code-switching serves as a visible marker of this transformation. [source] Modeling the invisible collegeJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 2 2006Alesia Zuccala This article addresses the invisible college concept with the intent of developing a consensus regarding its definition. Emphasis is placed on the term as it was defined and used in Derek de Solla Price's work (1963, 1986) and reviewed on the basis of its thematic progress in past research over the years. Special attention is given to Lievrouw's (1990) article concerning the structure versus social process problem to show that both conditions are essential to the invisible college and may be reconciled. A new definition of the invisible college is also introduced, including a proposed research model. With this model, researchers are encouraged to study the invisible college by focusing on three critical components,the subject specialty, the scientists as social actors, and the information use environment (IUE) [source] Social Correlates of Party System Demise and Populist Resurgence in VenezuelaLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2003Kenneth M. Roberts ABSTRACT Considering its strong, highly institutionalized two-party system, Venezuela was surely one of the least likely countries in Latin America to experience a party system breakdown and populist resurgence. That traditional party system nevertheless was founded on a mixture of corporatist and clientelist linkages to social actors that were unable to withstand the secular decline of the oil economy and several aborted attempts at market liberalization. Successive administrations led by the dominant parties failed to reverse the economic slide, with devastating consequences for the party system as a whole. The party system ultimately rested on insecure structural foundations; and when its social moorings crumbled in the 1990s, the populist movement of Hugo Chávez emerged to fill the political void. This populist resurgence both capitalized on and accelerated the institutional decomposition of the old order. [source] Constructing Reform Coalitions: The Politics of Compensations in Argentina's Economic LiberalizationLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2001Sebastián Etchemendy ABSTRACT It is frequently argued that the key to "successful" economic liberalization is to marginalize interest groups that profit from existing regulatory regimes. This paper contends that some established interests can craft public policies to protect their rents in the new market setting. The state may shape the interests of social actors and create proreform constituencies out of old populist and interventionist groups. In Argentina, this coalition building was achieved by constructing reform policies that granted rents in new markets to business and organized labor and by deliberately avoiding unilateral deregulation in sectors where reform would hurt traditionally powerful actors. This argument is developed through a comparative analysis of policy reform in the labor market institutions and protected industrial sectors, areas where the costs of deregulation are said to be unavoidable for the established actors. [source] The Cultural Power of Law and the Cultural Enactment of Legality: The Case of Same-Sex MarriageLAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2003Kathleen E. Hull This paper examines the legal consciousness of same-sex couples with respect to marriage. Data from an interview-based study of 71 members of same-sex couples reveal strong consensus on the desirability of having samesex relationships legally recognized, and considerable variation in couples'attempts to enact marriage culturally through various practices, including the use of marriage-related terminology and public commitment rituals. I argue that some of these efforts to enact marriage culturally should also be read as attempts to enact legality in the absence of official law. The findings from this study challenge the idea that marginalized social actors will tend toward a resistant legal consciousness: Rather than seeking to avoid and evade legality in their everyday lives, most same-sex couples seem to embrace legality for its practical and symbolic resources, even as they stand "against the law" in their opposition to the exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of legal marriage. Approaching marriage from the perspective of same-sex couples, this research demonstrates that the legal and cultural aspects of marriage are deeply intertwined. Cultural enactments of marriage enact legality even in the absence of official law, and many actors ascribe to law a cultural power that transcends its specific benefits and protections, the power to produce social and cultural equality. [source] Reconceptualizing Language, Language Learning, and the Adolescent Immigrant Language Learner in the Age of Postmodern GlobalizationLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 9 2010Peter I. De Costa The massive shift in migration patterns brought about by globalization has heavily impacted the language learning experience of adolescent immigrant learners. Given these changes wrought by globalization, this paper argues for a reconceptualization of language, language learning, and the adolescent immigrant language learner. In line with poststructural concerns that have framed recent SLA research on immigrant learners, particular emphasis is given to how a Bourdieusian framework offers constructs to better understand globalized linguistic flows. Such a framework, which views language as a form of capital, allows for a better understanding the consequences of globalization and the commodification of languages. Relatedly, to recognize the linguistic resources available to immigrant learners in the twenty-first century, the paper calls for a reconstitution of language along ideological, semiotic, and performative lines as well as a reframing of language learning through an ideology and identity lens. As a result of this linguistic reconceptualization, globalized adolescent immigrant language learners should be viewed as social actors who possess and are in the process of developing symbolic competence (cf. Kramsch and Whiteside 2007, 2008; Kramsch 2009). [source] On Neoliberalism and Other Social Diseases: The 2008 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in ReviewAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2009Justin B. Richland ABSTRACT In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo-American peer-reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related, trends. The first suggests an ongoing interest among sociocultural anthropologists in new forms and contexts of market capitalism and a deepening concern for the multiple, complex, and even contradictory orientations to those forms by social actors caught up in them. The second reveals a concern with the imbrications of political and scientific epistemologies, particularly as they emerge in state policies and actions around issues of public health, the environment, and agriculture. Where they come together is in the number of studies whose objects of inquiry reside at the nexus where science, politics, and markets meet in what they see as the creeping expansion of neoliberal logics and their implications for the state as a political formation. [Keywords: sociocultural anthropology, neoliberalism, science studies, public health, capitalism] [source] Giving Voice to Children's Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and PotentialsAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2007ALLISON JAMES In this article, I explore the lessons that the anthropological debates of the 1980s about writing culture might have for contemporary childhood research within anthropology and the social sciences more generally. I argue that the current rhetoric about "giving voice to children," commonplace both inside and outside the academy, poses a threat to the future of childhood research because it masks a number of important conceptual and epistemological problems. In particular, these relate to questions of representation, issues of authenticity, the diversity of children's experiences, and children's participation in research, all of which need to be addressed by anthropologists in their own research practices with children. Unless anthropologists do so, childhood research risks becoming marginalized once more and will fail to provide an arena within which children are seen as social actors who can provide a unique perspective on the social world about matters that concern them as children. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||