Previous theory and research on political alliances and power relations suggest that alliances between multiple excluded groups can succeed if differentially privileged subaltern constituencies communicate openly about power and hierarchy, negotiate mutual understandings of interdependence, and privilege pragmatism and flexibility over ideology and politics. By empirically analyzing political relations between Israeli and Palestinian political and human rights activists, this article examines a complicated case of political alliances and power relations between activists of a structurally dominant constituency and activists of a structurally disadvantaged constituency. I propose that by conceptualizing and investigating power, in both its material and discursive forms, ethnographic research can uncover the complex ways that inter-constituent consideration of power dynamics in political alliances are neither guaranteed to identify power inequalities nor likely to remove them. Theorizing power as absent-present helps to demonstrate how discursive power can be reproduced within the very political alliances that form to resist its material instantiations.
Historically, indigenous peoples have been positioned as instrumental compo nents of Mexico's authenticity by being largely imagined as belonging to rural spaces. Within the urban context, the indigenous body is frequently associated with the transience of clandestine communities. In the past two decades, these imaginaries have become challenged by the growing presence of indigenous people living, working, and studying in the nation's cities. The Wixarika population in Guadalajara and Tepic are a revealing case in point. While their aesthetic culture has become popular in private and public marketing schemes, they often face discrimination once they step into spaces traditionally held by non-indigenous segments of the population. The experiences of Wixarika uni versity students and professionals can inform us of the multiple ways in which majority-held notions of indigenous belonging and citizenship are negotiated in contemporary Mexico. Representations of the racialized Other, however impartial or distorted they may be, (f)actually take on a life of their own, entering into networks of circulation and social interaction, entering into a multitude of immediate and more dispersed transversal connections, becoming individually or collectively encountered in the situated practices of everyday life, occasionally simply fleeting by — being barely recog nized or totally ignored, more frequently capturing attention
This paper discusses Karl Polanyi's arguments regarding financialization and international (dis)order in The Great Transformation in comparison to John Hobson's Imperialism: A Study. This comparative analysis-which takes Hobson's paradigm as the reference for our comparison-is critical for understanding Polanyi's line of reasoning in the first two chapters of The Great Transformation as well as for overcoming some of the difficulties in adapting his arguments to the contemporary era of financialization. Although both Hobson and Polanyi examined the effects of the same financial actors (London capital markets) during the same time frame (the late nineteenth and early twentieth century), the contrast between their conclusions was very stark. Hobson saw financial interests as responsible for increasing interstate rivalry and imperialist aggression in the world as a whole, whereas Polanyi regarded the same financial interests as the protectors of peace and order. After comparing the positions of these two scholars, we discuss the relevance of their arguments in the context of late twentieth and early twenty-first century financialization.
Swapping Our Future : How Students and Taxpayers Are Funding Risky UC Borrowing and Wall Street Profits
There are two competing narratives for decision-making processes evidenced in accounts of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The narrative of moral failure focuses on the role played by compensation structures (and other principal-agent type issues) in encouraging executives to place their companies at risk. On the other hand, the narrative of cognitive failure emphasizes the inability of private and corporate actors to understand what they were doing. Although financial institutions have emerged as expert systems in the risk society, playing a key role in introducing new forms of manufactured risk into financial markets, the 2007-2008 financial crisis saw a widespread breakdown of systems and internal risk controls used in the industry, leading to the collapse (or near-collapse) of major financial institutions. Taking the narrative of 'cognitive failure' seriously, we identify the paradigm of quantifiable risk as an epistemic fallacy at the root of the financial crisis and ask why this dominant paradigm has endured in mainstream economics and risk management despite its repeated failures.
The more than modest aim ofthis review is to make a preliminary attempt at analytically classifying the rapidly growing accounts of the 2008 crisis. In order to make sense of the explanations put forward by sociologists, as well as by economists, policy analysts and experts, investigative journalists, and even practitioners of 'financial speculation,' I have organized my survey of this literature around three broad types, without negating the internal diversity and heterogeneity of these approaches. Each of these types highlights one key dimension of the implicit theoretical understandings of the preconditions of the recent global financial crisis: the unintended consequences of innovation; the combination of asset bubbles, inadequate regulation, and financial instability; and, finally, the crisis-prone character of capitalist dynamics and the overall financialization of the economy in late capitalism. These three thematic 'Keynesian/Minskian,' and 'Marxist' positiol1s, which 1 develop in Part 1 strictly as heuristic ideal types for the purpose of orienting analytical classification in Part II. That is, the necessarily sketchy introduction below is not meant to provide a comprehensive critical engagement with the views of Marx, Schumpeter, or Keynes/Minsky (treated here as a composite 'type', as I shall explain), but merely to accentuate, in a Weberian one-sided fashion, certain defining traits and their combinations, which seem to be recurrent in the literature that review in Part II. In other words, these three ideal types elaborated below do not claim to provide exhaustive synoptic surveys of Keynes's, Marx's, Minsky's, or Schumpeter's observations about crises, but simply to serve as analytical descriptors, which can help us better grasp significant differences among alternative ways of conceptualizing crises.
Studies of 'the popular' in post-Mao China tend to celebrate the category as representing the creativity and diversity of ordinary people, as against the controlling forces of a monolithic state. To offer a more critical view of the issue, this paper looks at how China's news media has been negatively affected by commercial and technological developments that make it more oriented to popular tastes. Through the everyday discourse and work practices of journalists and editors in Beijing and Guangzhou, I show firstly that commercialization has led news producers to focus on stories that are 'hot' or popular among consumers, regardless of their social import. Second, journalists' increasing use of Internet technologies to gather news draws a further distance between the news media and social reality. It makes news production a sensorially remote activity of information management, unrelated to journalists' experiences and opinions. Both commercialization of the media and the rise of the Internet in China have been seen as leading to political liberalization by creating new arenas for popular expression. This paper shows that the same changes also lead to a certain disarticulation between such expressions or representations and lived social reality. The political significance of this form of 'the popular' remains uncertain.
The ways African American women negotiate the intersections of popular media, dominant discourses of beauty, and identity are rarely explored. This study engages a constellation of literature and theoretical perspectives, exploring historical representations of African American women and the beauty messages they contain. I examine concepts of identity formation; discuss connections between difference and the politics of imagery; and investigate linkages between structural racism, mass media, and forms of cultural production. Through an interrogation of the complexities in how African American women make meaning of images of themselves, in relationship to mainstream media, I seek to excavate a set of realities known to many, but rarely articulated in academia. This account of a larger study, that utilized empirical and qualitative methods that engage Black women, across four generational groups, through in- depth interviews, a series of three focus groups/women's healing circles, and individual journaling workshops, only discusses some findings from primarily the in depth interviews. The combination of methodologies however allowed for a documentation of the ideas, struggles, and attitudes of African American women pertaining to popular concepts of beauty, identity, and politics of media. With the goal of interrupting current hegemonic narratives, this study offers an analysis of the intersection of beauty, race, and feminisms while critiquing and interrupting cultural imperialism; and aims to join with Black feminist bodies of work in developing new theories that engage African American women to reflect and acknowledge the complex and varied realities of media's impact on gender, race, sex, equality, and identity as converging constructs.
In this paper I draw on insights from my ethnographic work on daytime talk shows and reality programming to explore the meaning of as it unfolds in the reality context. I characterize reality programming as a form of television in which producers construct the necessary conditions of performance and real-people participants serve themselves (more or less successfully) to these performances. The result is ordinary -- or self-serve -- celebrity. My aim here is to use the concept of ordinary to consider what media exposure means to, and how it operates for, so-called ordinary people, with an eye to its gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions. Inspired by but not limited to ethnographic evidence, I explore the cultural work being done by self-service and the implications of this work for rethinking the connection between celebrity and the performance of everyday life, as well as the place of ordinary in American popular culture.
The coexistence of border-enforcement policies such as Operation Gatekeeper and economic liberalization programs such as NAFTA is arguably paradoxi cal given the simultaneous push towards a freeflow of products but curtailed flow of labor. This paper presents a critical review and reassement of existing accounts ofneoliberal statehood to make sense of this apparent puzzle. While some have argued that the state is eroding under neoliberal globalization, a more sophisticated analysis has focused on how it has been transformed. David Harvey and Lo'ic Wacquant focus on the role of the repressive apparatus in upholding neoliberalism. Building on Harvey and Wacquant, and returning to Karl Polanyi, I emphasize the ways in which the state has tried to make use of a repressive apparatus as a claim to social protection — a function that becomes necessary as the state advances liberalization. The coexistence of NAFTA and Gatekeeper should be not be understood as an anomaly but rather as an expected feature of contemporary statehood. In 1994 the U.S. federal government began the implementation of two seemingly contradictory policies: on the one hand, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which would push for sub stantial liberalization of markets between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.; on the other hand, Operation Gatekeeper, a program of unprecedented proportions to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border in order to block the migratory flow. What explains the coexistence of these policies? The parallel easing of state boundaries for trade and the reassertion of these boundaries in regards to labor mobility merits study as a critical site for the development of an understanding of contemporary statehood. This paper presents a critical review of existing accounts of the neoliberal state with the aim of coming to terms at the theoretical level with the apparent paradox of open and closed borders. The expansion of neoliberalism brought about a wave of theoriza tion regarding the imminent erosion of state boundaries and capacities (Herzog 1992; Soysal 1994; Sassen 1995). A more robust set of argu ments has developed against this position and has instead focused on the ways in which the state has been transformed (not withered away) (Brenner 2004; Harvey 2005; Wacquant 2009). While the case of NAFTA Gatekeeper calls for a move away from the first position, it also calls for a rethinking and further development of the second position. Building This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 05:51:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This papers analyzes how Orthodox Jewish women constitute their gendered religious positions by employing their newly gained sacredtextual knowledge to interpret halakha (Jewish law and religious practice). Employing the Bakhtin Circle 's notions of addressee, genre, and intertextuality to analyze the first published book of Orthodox women 's legal writings, it discusses the extent to which Orthodox Jewish women simultaneously reinscribe and challenge rabbinic treatment of women while forging positions as religious scholars. It places women 's legal writings in the larger context of how their scholarship is received by the authorizing Orthodox male rabbinate, investigating how, and the extent to which, male-rabbinic reception shapes women 's subsequent writing and activism.
The complex nature of civil-society accountability places specific methodological demands on INGOs account for their work, and conversely on particular types of account-making shape INGOs ' relationships with their diverse stakeholders. This paper outlines a preliminary theoretical framework which views the multidirectional character of INGO accountability as constructed, negotiated, and contested through the interplay of power and knowledge. Thus, INGOs ' upward accountability to donors necessarily emphasizes different measurement methods and techniques than their downward accountability toward local communities, or even horizontal accountability to their own organizational missions and values. Examples from two INGOs in Bangladesh demonstrate various accountability commitments are negotiated and prioritized through their measurement, monitoring, and evaluation practices. The paper concludes by arguing that current expectations for knowledge-based accounts (i.e., decisionmaking, demonstrating competitiveness, and advocacy) inevitably prioritize the interests of INGOs ' upward stakeholders over the local communities and populations for whom they work. The relationship between knowledge and the governance of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) has thus far been examined almost exclusively from the perspective of INGOs using knowledge in their role as accountability watchdogs in relation to states, intergovernmental organizations, and other governing bodies (Brown and Fox 2001; Fox and Brown 1998; Fox 2001; Jasanoff 1997; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Consequently, the ways in which specialized forms of knowledge are used in INGOs' own governance, including the use of particular measurement methodologies to secure their organizational accountability and legitimacy, have yet to be fully explored. This paper begins to investigate the complex nature of INGO accountability places specific methodological demands on they account for their work, and conversely particular types of account-making shape INGOs' relationships with their diverse This content downloaded from 157.55.39.220 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 04:04:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY stakeholders. The first section provides a brief review of the growing importance of INGOs on the global stage to provide historical context for why accountability is one of the key issues facing humanitarian and development organizations today. The second section lays out a preliminary theoretical framework that treats accountability as an intrinsically political and epistemic practice that is, accountability relationships are viewed as constructed, negotiated, and contested through the interplay of power and knowledge. As a result, the multidirectional character of INGO accountability is presented as one that must balance three general types of power configurations among stakeholders and their corresponding criteria for appropriate account-making. The third section maps out the different types of INGO-stakeholder relationships to highlight specific power configurations are shaping the discourse around the who and how of INGO account-making. Thus, INGOs' upward accountability to donor stakeholders unavoidably emphasizes different measurement methods and techniques than their downward accountability towards local communities, or even horizontal accountability to their own organizational missions and values. Given that the legitimacy of INGOs is dependent upon successfully maintaining multiple types of relationships, it is suggested that INGOs must practice a form of methodological pluralism to produce accounts that satisfy all of their various stakeholders. The final section presents examples of multidirectional accountability plays out in the measurement, monitoring and evaluation practices of two INGOs in Bangladesh. Findings from these INGOs suggest that they have multiple and largely separate systems of measurement that produce targeted accounts for different stakeholder groups. Examples of INGOs' various accountability commitments are negotiated and prioritized through the measurement, monitoring, and evaluation practices are presented. The paper concludes by identifying three areas (i.e., decision-making, competition, and advocacy) that have gained importance in the current climate of aid and development reform which require INGOs to produce accounts that prioritize the interests of their upward stakeholders over the local communities and populations for
I just want to thank Gil. This was a long and complex paper. There are a lot of things in it, and actually, I thought your presentation of it was really excellent. It was actually clarifying to listen to you talk about it. So, I don't know if the paper's been circulated. Has it been circulated? I assume, those of you who are interested: you should read it, because this talk was obviously complex and very difficult to follow, in certain kinds of ways. So, I'm just going to make a couple of broad comments, some theoretical and some empirical. As Gil alluded to, there are sort of three theoretical things going on here. One is Andy Abbott's theory of professions, the next is the actor-network approach of Latour, and then the third is the theory of fields. When you read the paper, one of the senses you get from it is that it's really an argument about the superiority of the actor-network approach. At the end of the talk today, he was really trying to position himself a little bit more around these other theories. But in the paper, he seems to come down more with the actor-network approach. What I would like to do, just to push that point with Gil a little bit, is to say: what would Abbott's response to what you said be, and what would a Bourdieusian response be? Put another way, what are the facts you ignore here that the actor-network approach doesn't get at? What the actor-network approach is good at is getting exactly what you talked about: these relations, these complicated interactions that are occurring, that they are actually being constructed, that there isn't a teleology underlying all of it. I thought you did a great job of presenting that. But what doesn't this give us? I think the first thing it doesn't give us and this is something that is in Andy Abbott, I think is that if we think about the psychiatry profession at the time all of this was happening, it was undergoing enormous transformation. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis after the Second World War were under assault as being non-scientific, and as being a dead end in a set of treatments that would solve psychological problems. What this meant in the 1950s is that there was a fragmentation in that field, and contestation going on over what psychology more generally would be. This is a kind of Abbott point. Gil's part of it the autism problem in some ways is one part of the whole story about the psychiatry profession in this era. Gil's story needs to be read back to that larger struggle about what was going to be an account of what was going on here. So the people in Gil's autism story, who he
