774 research outputs found
Organisational participation and women - an attitude problem?
Employee participation is a dynamic and contested area of organisational behaviour, attracting continuing academic, practitioner and policy interest and debate. This chapter focuses on organisational participation and women
State business: gender, sex and marriage in Tajikistan
This article examines the relation of the state to masculinity and sexuality by way of an exploration of the sexual problems of a young man and his wife in Tajikistan at the end of the Soviet era. It suggests that the regimeâs inattention to this kind of issue was bound up with the importance to the state of projecting appropriate versions of masculinity. It further posits the idea that the continued refusal of the independent Tajik state to offer appropriate treatments for sexual dysfunction is consistent with the image of modernity President Rahmon wishes to present to the world. The article shows that as masculinity discursively occupies the superior gender position, with men expected to dominate, the state is itself impotent to respond when they are, in fact, unable to do so in sexual practice. However, the myth of male dominance persists to the point that it may prevent women from seeing beyond their subordination and finding mutually beneficial solutions in their familial and sexual relationships
Purification and preliminary characterization of alcohol dehydrogenase from Aspergillus nidulans
Social democracy, embeddedness and decommodification: On the conceptual innovations and intellectual affiliations of Karl Polanyi
Of the several debates that revolve around the work of the economic historian and political economist Karl Polanyi, one that continues to exercise minds concerns his analysis of, and political attitudes toward, post-war capitalism and the welfare state. Simplified a little, it is a debate with two sides. To borrow IvĂĄn SzelĂ©nyi's terms, one side constructs a âhardâ Karl Polanyi, the other a âsoftâ one. The former advocated a socialist mixed economy dominated by redistributive mechanisms. He was a radical socialist for whom the market should never be the dominant mechanism of economic coordination. His âsoftâ alter ego insisted that the market system remain essentially intact but be complemented by redistributive mechanisms. The âdouble movementâ â the central thesis of his âGreat Transformationâ â acts, in this reading, as a self-correcting mechanism that moderates the excesses of market fundamentalism; its author was positioned within the social-democratic mainstream for which the only realistic desirable goal is a regulated form of capitalism. In terms of textual evidence there is much to be said for both interpretations. In this article I suggest a different approach, one that focuses upon the meaning of Polanyi's concepts in relation to their socio-political and intellectual environment
Responsible participation and housing: restoring democratic theory to the scene
Tensions between individual liberty and collective social justice characterise many advanced liberal societies. These tensions are reflected in the challenges posed for representative democracy both by participatory democratic practices and by the current emphasis on (so-called) responsible participation. Based on the example of âcommunityâ housing associations in Scotland, this paper explores these tensions. It is argued that the critique of responsibility may have been over-stated â that, in particular, âcommunityâ housing associations offer the basis for relatively more inclusive and effective processes of decision-making than council housing, which relies on the traditional processes and institutions of representative local government for its legitimacy
Why Social Enterprises Are Asking to Be Multi-stakeholder and Deliberative: An Explanation around the Costs of Exclusion.
The study of multi-stakeholdership (and multi-stakeholder social enterprises in particular) is only at the start. Entrepreneurial choices which have emerged spontaneously, as well as the first legal frameworks approved in this direction, lack an adequate theoretical support. The debate itself is underdeveloped, as the existing understanding of organisations and their aims resist an inclusive, public interest view of enterprise. Our contribution aims at enriching the thin theoretical reflections on multi-stakeholdership, in a context where they are already established, i.e. that of social and personal services.
The aim is to provide an economic justification on why the governance structure and decision-making praxis of the firm needs to account for multiple stakeholders. In particular with our analysis we want: a) to consider production and the role of firms in the context of the âpublic interestâ which may or may not coincide with the non-profit objective; b) to ground the explanation of firm governance and processes upon the nature of production and the interconnections between demand and supply side; c) to explain that the costs associated with multi-stakeholder governance and deliberation in decision-making can increase internal efficiency and be âproductiveâ since they lower internal costs and utilise resources that otherwise would go astray.
The key insight of this work is that, differently from major interpretations, property costs should be compared with a more comprehensive range of costs, such as the social costs that emerge when the supply of social and personal services is insufficient or when the identification of aims and means is not shared amongst stakeholders. Our model highlights that when social costs derived from exclusion are high, even an enterprise with costly decisional processes, such as the multistakeholder, can be the most efficient solution amongst other possible alternatives
The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan
This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movementâs critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned,
and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized
laborâs propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japanâs most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women
Domestic knowledge, inequalities and differences
Research suggests that domestic knowledge is an expression of gender differences, which is constructed and deployed through unequal social relations, and is able to empower women if it gains collective spaces of expression. The article presents an analysis of parental involvement at school in Spain so as to underpin the former thesis and highlight its connection with the political theory about the "sexual contract"
Names, bodies and identities
In this article, I argue that the emerging field of the sociology of naming should recognize the fundamental importance of bodies in the range of social practices through which individuals come to have, and to be identified by, names. I introduce the concept of âembodied named identityâ to describe the outcome of identificatory practices of naming fundamentally orientated around and rooted in the body. I argue that the concept addresses the neglect of the body within the sociology of names and the neglect of naming within both the sociology of identity and in the sociology of the body. In my elaboration of the value of the concept of embodied named identity for enhancing sociological understanding, I focus on evidence on naming practices in relation to sexed and gendered bodies, racialized and ethnic bodies, bodies, nicknames and characterization, ânamelessâ bodies and âbody-lessâ names
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