Memories of Mary Ellen Rudin

An invited collective remembrance celebrating Mary Ellen Rudin's lif

Social Work, Risk, Power

Contemporary ideas and strategies of both \'risk\' and \'power\' are significant and dynamic influences in social theory and social action, and they can therefore be expected to have a substantial impact on the ways in which social work is constituted, practiced and evaluated. In this article, I shall articulate distinct conceptualisations and debates about each of these, before considering their inter-relationships and the implications of these for our thinking about what social work is, and what it should be. Firstly, I will consider social work\'s contested and problematic place within the broader welfare domain. It is recognised as being a form of activity which inhabits an ambiguous and uncertain position at the interface between the individual and the social, and between the marginalised and the mainstream. Building on this, \'power\' will be shown to infuse social work ideas and practices in a number of distinct dimensions, linking and bridging \'personal\', \'positional\' and \'relational\' domains. This discussion will be juxtaposed with a discussion of \'risk\' and the part it has come to play in shaping and infusing social work practices, especially but not exclusively with children. The deconstruction of contemporary understandings and uses of risk as a central and \'authoritative\' feature of assessment and decision-making will inform the argument that it can be viewed as a vehicle for the maintenance and legitimation of power relations which disenfranchise and oppress those who are most vulnerable. In conclusion, I will summarise the ways in which conventional understandings and inter-related material realities of power and risk are often hierarchical, uni-directional and oppressive; and on this basis, how they can be laid open to challenge. The reconceptualisation and remaking of power relations will be shown to have direct consequences for the ways in which risk is defined and addressed as a social work \'problem\'.Social Work, Risk, Power, Social Justice, Authority, Legitimacy Left_arrows

Trademarks as Fictitious Commodities: An Erosion of the Public Interest? An Assessment of the use of trademarks over urban space at the example of London’s Regent Street and Paris’ Champs-Elysées

With reference to Karl Polyani’s notion of fictitious commodities we evaluate whether the protection of two worldwide known streets, namely ‘Regent Street’ in London and the ‘Champs- Elysées’ in Paris may be perceived as an erosion of the public interest and thus call for potential policy reformulation or reforms to substantive trademark law. The reasons for this choice are twofold: Firstly, the existing body of literature offers an in-depth discussion on the complex dynamics between the public interest and patents and copyrights, yet relatively little has been said so far on the correlation of the public interest and trademarks. Secondly, trademark protection over urban space is a recent phenomenon that has in and by itself not yet been properly grasped, neither from a policy, commercial or legal perspective. We conclude that the ownership structure of each of these two trademarks suggests that, contrary to intuition, it is the use of trademark protection rather than the renouncement from trademark protection that guarantees, at least in these two instances, the public interest. We contend however that the increased use of trademark protection over urban space does bear the potential for the erosion of the public interest and call upon policy makers to formulate guidelines in that respect.Fictitious Commodities, Public Interest, Trademarks, Urban Space, International Economic Integration, Global Competitiveness, Branding Street names, Double Movement Fictitious Commodities, Public Interest, Trademarks, Urban Space, International Economic Integration, Global Competitiveness, Branding Street names, Double Movement Fictitious Commodities, Public Interest, Trademarks, Urban Space, International Economic Integration, Global Competitiveness, Branding Street names, Double Movement

Spartan Daily, January 28, 1980

Volume 74, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6568/thumbnail.jp

The dynamics of Orangeism in Scotland: social sources of political influence in a mass-member organization, 1860-2001

Like other voluntary associations, fraternities such as the Orange Order underpin political cleavages. The membership dynamics behind such associations are less clear. Rival theories attribute membership fluctuations alternatively to changes in social capital, economic structure, culture, or events. This article uses a pooled time-series cross-sectional model to evaluate competing hypotheses for the period since 1860. Results suggest that membership was linked to longer-term shifts in ethnic boundaries rather than structural or social capital variables, with events playing an intermediate role. Scottish Protestant mobilization against Catholics was less important than Irish Protestant ethnicity, but both were key. Finally, the order has been numerically weaker than many believe; hence its inability—even during the apex of its influence—to shape Tory policy

"The Most Hazardous and Dangerous and Greatest Adventure on Which Man Has Ever Embarked": The Frontier in Presidential Pro-Space Discourse, 1957-1963

Since the inception of the US Space Program, space exploration has been linked in public discourse to the cluster of ideas and images constituting "the frontier." In the seven years between 1957 and 1963, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy moved the nation from Sputnik-stunned to burgeoning space pioneers, linking the language of scientific and technological advancement to American exceptionalism and the romance and adventure of the frontier. Thus, the nation's conception of the space program, as a significant feature in the US-Soviet agon, was initially encouraged by early Presidential space discourse. The image endured well beyond the early years of the space program, to the turn of the century and the completion of the nation's shuttle program. I argue that the ideas and images that constitute the frontier proved to be such a potent symbolic framework in American society that it functioned as a terministic screen for presidential pro-space discourse from the Eisenhower administration on. As the space age dawned, Dwight D. Eisenhower co-opted the dominant metaphor to justify his pragmatic and measured response to the Soviet Union's dramatic space achievements. One term later, John F. Kennedy's symbolic trajectory evolved pro-space discourse, building from an early continuation of Eisenhower's pragmatism to a transcendent justification for his vision of the nation's accelerated space efforts couched in a soaring mythic language, strains of which are still evident today. This nearly ubiquitous and certainly enduring nature of the space-frontier association in both popular and technical discourse signals its potential importance to rhetorical scholars and historians alike

Student Teacher Performance Related to Cognitive Style

Research conducted in the field of cognitive style suggests there are certain learning styles which can be identified, defined and measured. However, the literature points out that a neglected aspect of research is an exploration of relationships between students\u27 cognitive styles and performance. The goal of this study was to explore whether the cognitive style manner of reasoning scales were jointly and differentially, related to student teachers\u27 academic performance. The sample consisted of 40 primary school student teachers enrolled in the second year of the Diploma in Teaching course at the Townsville College of Advanced Education, Townsville, Queensland. Data was gathered by the Hill Cognitive Style Mapping instrument. Student teacher scores on an academic task were used to measure performance. The data were analysed by multiple and stepwise regression techniques. Results of the study were that: (a) cognitive style manner of reasoning scales, operating jointly, contributed 30.~.% of the variance in student teacher academic performance and (b) cognitive style manner of reasoning scales - . relationships, categorical and appraisal, operating differentially, accounted for 9.8%, 9.1 % and 8.7% respectively, of the variance in student teacher academic performance. Results were statistically significant at the .05 level

Sociology of Agriculture and Food Beginning and Maturity: The Contribution of the Missouri School (1976-1994)

Sociology of agriculture and food (SAF) is one of the most visible substantive subareas in Rural Sociology and a growing subarea in Sociology. While the studying of agriculture has always been a part of Rural Sociology, it was in the 1970s that the process that led to a clear and formal distinction between Rural Sociology and SAF began. SAF grew stronger in the 1980s and became established in the 1990s. This paper reviews salient theoretical and historical events that engendered the establishment and growth of SAF as a separate substantive area from Rural Sociology. Additionally, it reviews its development in the United States in relation to a movement that has been global since its onset. In particular, the paper addresses the ways in which SAF developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia under the intellectual leadership of William Heffernan. Heffernan’s “radical” reading of, and methodological approach to, the evolution of agriculture and food are compared with other popular views of, and approaches to, SAF such as the Marxist and the Constructionist. It is argued that Heffernan’s approach is grounded in the American theoretical tradition of Pragmatic Democracy exemplified by the classical work of John Dewey. Research on SAF produced at the University of Missouri-Columbia became highly visible as SAF reached its maturity in the mid-1990s. Heffernan’s intellectual contribution remains most influential in current salient debates within SAF

Electronic bits and ten gallon hats : Enron, American culture and the postindustrial political economy

This dissertation uses the Enron Corporation as a case study to examine the ways in which large-scale corporations become cultural actors in pursuit of establishing favorable regulatory environments, and how Enron's collapse in 2001 allowed United States citizens to protest and express anxiety over a national and international economic shift towards postindustrialism that began in the early 1970s. Through a consideration of materials such as marketing literature, correspondence between Enron executives and state and federal government officials, and the entire run of Enron Business, the employee magazine, as well as popular cultural texts, including, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as film and book-length narrative accounts of the company, this study contributes to an understanding of the cultural work that must be performed in order to establish and maintain political economic systems, as well as the ways in which cultural production is used to make sense of economic change. In many ways, Enron manifested a number of prominent political economic changes during the late twentieth century that have been identified by scholars such as David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. From the 1980s onward, the company increasing eschewed large-scale industrial operations in favor of information-based businesses that mirrored industries such as finance. Enron’s concomitant rhetorical shift to an emphasis on information technologies worked to mask and render culturally palatable the spatial, economic and political implications of this change. Because Enron was a company that engaged in cultural production, and because its transformation from a pipeline operator to a derivatives trading house was so dramatic, the company became an ideal site for Americans to express cultural anxieties about the move away from Fordist, material production and towards an emphasis on working with complicated pieces of information. However, despite the company's symbolic value, no coherent criticism of the economic features Enron embodied emerged in the public outcry, suggesting that the cultural materials needed to advance a sustained critique of late capitalism had not yet developed.American Studie