Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things: Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective

This special issue offers a first systematic qualitative cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in a wide variety of contexts. This research is the culmination of a coordinated study of stigmatized groups in Brazil, Israel, and the United States, as well as of connected research projects conducted in Canada, France, South Africa, and Sweden. The issue sheds light on the range of destigmatization strategies ordinary people adopt in the course of their daily life. Articles analyze the cultural frames they mobilize to make sense of their experiences and to determine how to respond; how they negotiate and transform social and symbolic boundaries; and how responses are enabled and constrained by institutions, national ideologies, cultural repertoires, and contexts. The similarities and differences across sites provide points of departure for further systematic research, which is particularly needed in light of the challenges raised by multiculturalism and diversity for liberal democracy.African and African American StudiesSociolog

Confrontation Vs Conflict Avoidance: how minorities across international borders deal with racism

Jean-Philippe Dedieu interviews Harvard scholar Michèle Lamont about her latest book, Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective co-authored with Nissim Mizrachi

The institutional management of mind-body dualism: The battle over psychosomatic medicine.

This study examines the emergence and persistence of the American psychosomatic movement as represented by the journal Psychosomatic Medicine founded in 1939, and the American Society for Psychosomatic Research which was established three years later. It traces the history of the movement from 1938 through 1979. Inspired by psychoanalysis, the founders of psychosomatic medicine called into question the profound metaphysical distinction between the mind and the body which has shaped Western philosophy and epistemology from ancient to modern times. How psychosomatic medicine became marginalized and absorbed into the bio-medical dominant discourse is the subject of this study. Unlike most approaches to sociology of science, which emphasize the role of social factors in shaping epistemology and knowledge, this study focuses on the role of epistemology in forming institutional choices and organizational structures and practices. The arguments are based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of extensive primary sources, such as the minutes of the Editorial Board and the Council from 1938 through 1979, comments of referees on rejected and accepted papers, and correspondence between central figures of the movement and external medical authorities. The study explores the convoluted interplay between the movement's inability to transcend dualistic language and epistemology, and the institutional and organizational processes that led to its eventual marginalization and absorption within the jurisdiction of the medical profession. It shows how its failure to mark a distinct discursive territory and to form its own scientific identity beyond the division between psychiatry and somatic medicine--in itself an institutional manifestation of the mind-body split--led to the movement's fundamental institutional uncertainty. Espousing legitimate organizational forms and practices was necessary to keep the psychosomatic enterprise alive and within the jurisdiction of the medical profession. This institutional mimesis was necessary for gaining legitimacy, attaining organizational and economic stability, and providing a cultural ethos and rationale for the movement. At the same time it played a role in maintaining and perpetuating the dualistic epistemology that the founders sought to supersede. Paradoxically, Psychosomatic Medicine's failure to transcend the Cartesian split was the key to its success in surviving as a legitimate medical organization seeking to keep up with the environmental changes in the growing field of behavioral medicine, and to secure its position at the margin--in the psyche province of the medical profession.Ph.D.Health and Environmental SciencesMedicinePhysiological psychologyPsychologyScience historySocial SciencesSocial structureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131056/2/9825308.pd

A time of peace: Divergent temporalities in Jewish–Palestinian peace initiatives

This article considers the conflicting temporal models of peace among Jewish Israelis, specifically between liberal Zionists who populate the traditional peace camp, and the broader population that largely ignores or opposes such initiatives. We compare the mainstream peace process with budding alternative non-liberal peace initiatives on one issue—the relative importance of a signed peace agreement—to explore diverging visions of temporal progression as they relate to the shared value of peace. The article claims that peace initiatives emerging from the liberal worldview reflect a vision in which the transition to peace will be a concrete temporal event, and that the horizon of peace is achievable, qualitative, and permanent. By contrast, the non-liberal initiatives reflect a belief that peace is modular and relative, that the transition to peace is inherently gradual, never to be fully achieved, dynamic, and impermanent

Between formal and enacted policy: changing the contours of boundaries

This study examines the strategies of the biomedical discourse vis-à-vis the growing public demand for alternative medicine by comparing formal and informal claims for jurisdiction. The analysis is based on two main sources of data from Israel: (a) two formal position statements, and (b) a series of participant observations and interviews with practitioners in clinical settings where biomedical and alternative practitioners collaborate. At the formal level, the biomedical discourse seeks to secure its dominant position by drawing strict cognitive and moral lines differentiating "proper biomedicine" from "improper alternative medicine." At this level alternative medicine appears morally "contaminated" and its knowledge-base delegitimized by extreme forms of boundary-work. At the informal level, the contour of boundaries change. In the hospital field where alternative and biomedical practitioners are collaborating, mutual respect was expressed even as social and symbolic boundaries were being demarcated. Modifying the forms of boundary-work appears to be biomedicine's reactive strategy in the field to changing environmental and market demands. It is a strategy that allows biomedical discourse to absorb its competitor within its professional jurisdiction with no battle, while retaining absolute epistemological hegemony and Institutional Control.Alternative medicine Biomedicine Boundary-work Israel

Repertoires of trust: The practice of trust in a multinational organization amid political conflict

Sociologists and other social scientists have recently renewed their interest in the concept of trust. Multidisciplinary studies have identified social psychological, economic, and structural determinants of trust; traced its development in interpersonal relationships; and explored its transformation in response to modernization. Drawing on ethnographic research at a multinational corporation operating in a politically charged environment, we reexamine these approaches to trust. We explore trust relations between Israeli and Jordanian managers in an Israeli-Jordanian industrial site. Trust, always tenuous in multinational collaboration, poses formidable challenges to this fragile relationship between former enemies. Comparing trust relations during normalization and political unrest provides a natural experiment for observing how forms of trust change in response to a transformed political environment. We show how Jordanians and Israelis apply different forms of trust alternately and interchangeably, transcending cultural dichotomies such as tradition and modernity and deviating from presupposed developmental paths. Following practice theory, our "trust repertoires" approach depicts actors as knowledgeable agents who select, compose, and apply different forms of trust as part of their cultural repertoires. By applying forms of trust, actors demarcate the boundaries of their social relationships. At the same time, actors' strategies are inextricably intertwined with the power structure and political context. In the conclusion, we consider the implications of this analysis for control and coordination in the workplace, including labor process theories

Entering the well-guarded fortress: alternative practitioners in hospital settings

There is a growing evidence that alternative health care practitioners and physicians are working together in collaborative patterns. The paper examines these collaborative patterns in hospital settings in Israel. On the theoretical level, the specific issues relate to theories concerning relationships between dominant institutional structures which enjoy the benefits of epistemological legitimacy as well as extensive, supportive social structures and groups of non-conformists who seek to attain many of the same goals by utilizing different methods based on other epistemologies. In the most general sense, the issues involved concern processes of accommodation and social change. Data were collected by means of semi-structured, qualitative interviews in four general hospitals in Jerusalem during 2000. Nineteen persons were interviewed including 10 alternative practitioners working in a variety of fields and nine biomedical practitioners who worked with them (six physicians and three nurses). Interviews focused on background and training, reasons for entry into the hospital, length of practice, status in the hospital system, mode of remuneration, content of work, modes of interaction with others in the hospital and problems encountered. The findings suggest a dual process of simultaneous acceptance and marginalization of alternative practitioners. While small numbers of alternative practitioners were found to be practicing in a wide variety of hospital departments and in a broad spectrum of specialties, they were in no way accepted as regular staff members and their marginality was made clear by a variety of visible structural, symbolic and geographical cues. There is a division of labour expressed by focusing on the biomedical practitioners on the diagnosis and treatment of specific disease entities, while the alternative practitioners work in the illness context, concentrating of feelings and affective states involving the alleviation of pain, suffering and efforts to improve the quality of life.Alternative medicine Complementary medicine Hospitals Israel