Search results

The aim of this article is an analysis of the links between race and psychotic illness, psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, as well as psychiatric, police and prison violence against people with mental health problems. The analysis focuses on Black men who are more frequently diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders and who face more brutal treatment than other people with such diagnoses. We have adopted a multidisciplinary approach which draws insights from psychiatry, psychology, and sociology and challenges the biologistic interpretation of “mental illness.” We take into account the United States and Britain – two countries with large Black minorities and an established tradition of research on these groups. Among the crucial findings of this study are the facts that racial bias and stereotypes heavily influence the way Black men with a diagnosis of psychotic illness are treated by the psychiatric system, police and prison staff, and that the dominant approach to psychosis masks the connections between racism and mental health.

This paper explores the role of institutional objects in the constitution of institutional logics. Institutional objects depend for their objectivity on the goods produced through those objects, such as economic models, passports, or sacred texts. The authors theorize institutional logics as grammars of valuation that institutionalize goods through institutional objects. The authors identify four value moments through which goods are objectified: institution, the instituting of a good, a belief and an imagination of its objective goodness; production, how the good is produced, what practices are productive of the good; evaluation, how good is the good, the practices and objects through which worth in terms of that good is determined, and territorialization, the domain of reference of the good, to what objects and practices a good can and does refer in its instantiations. The authors assess the adequacy of our model through an institutional object based on the good of “market value” – i.e., an options pricing model. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for institutional logical theory and the sociology of valuation.

Historians have long understood that transforming people into property was the defining characteristic of Atlantic World slavery. This chapter examines litigation in British colonial Vice Admiralty Courts in order to show how English legal categories and procedures facilitated this process of dehumanization. In colonies where people were classified as chattel property, litigants transformed local Vice Admiralty Courts into slave courts by analogizing human beings to ships and cargo. Doing so made sound economic sense from their perspective; it gave colonists instant access to an early modern English legal system that was centered on procedures and categories. But for people of African descent, it had decidedly negative consequences. Indeed, when colonists treated slaves as property, they helped to create a world in which Africans were not just like things, they were things. Through the very act of categorization, they rendered factual what had been a mere supposition: that Africans were less than human.

Purpose – This chapter draws on tenets of the “new” sociology of childhood, which posit that children are affected by social structures in the same way that adults are, to formulate an explanation for the black–white test-score gap.

Methodology – It builds on an analysis of ethnographic fieldnotes, which recorded the experiences of early elementary school students in a racially homogeneous school in a low-income African-American neighborhood.

Findings – The case is made that the children were oppressed by adults in the school. Being in school was almost a wholly negative experience for children. Students' active strategies to protect the self were ineffective, which led to their shutting down emotionally. Like adults in similar social contexts, children's energy was devoted to self-protection rather than to being a student.

Like popularized stories amplifying the dangers associated with stranger-predator street crime, immigrant-as-criminal narratives are as widespread as they are inconsistent with the best available data. A growing body of research suggests that immigration not only does not increase crime, it may reduce it. Building on what Scheingold referred to as political criminology, our analysis suggests that the continued salience of immigrant-as-criminal narratives tells us more about politics and power, the symbolic life of the law, and the multifaceted importance of proximity to understanding debates about crime and punishment, than it tells us about how to construct more effective immigration or crime control policies.

In order to elaborate the concept of resources (a key component of the well-established resource-based theory of the firm) this paper concentrates on exploring and elaborating the associated concept of competences, in particular distinctive and core competences. This exploration includes an examination of the extant literature, alongside and in parallel with, an extensive body of action research undertaken over 15 years and with 44 top management teams engaged in strategy making. As such the concepts are scrutinized both in terms of their theoretical underpinnings as well as their impact on practice. The research reinforces the view that distinctiveness emerges most powerfully from the identification (or creation) of unique bundles or combinations of competences and that effective and meaningful core competences can be identified from understanding and refining the links between competences and organizational goals. The resultant conceptualization of the systemic competence/goals structure emerges from the interaction of theory and practice.

The United States of America is on the verge of a possible revolution in civil-military relations in an era marked by increased defensive alertness stemming from the attacks of 11 September 2001. As we anticipate the normalization of terror as a way of life, we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift from the use of violence towards some political end to the use of violence as an end in itself (Jenkins, 2001). 1 It is tempting to frame our analysis in terms of the broader notion of asymmetric warfare, since the arguments we make in this paper may be applied to a wide range of settings, including those in which vastly unequal forces are pitted against one another and one side may make use of irregular fighters employing unconventional tactics. However, this would serve only to shift the emphasis away from our central argument. Terrorism may be a form of asymmetric warfare, but what distinguishes it is the fact that it intentionally targets civilians, and that among civilians, it is indiscriminate in the devastation it wreaks. Terrorism is important because of the way in which it socializes danger, breaking down the barriers between combatant and noncombatant and subjecting all to the worst of harrowing and potentially lethal attacks. It is this socialization of danger produced by terrorism, in turn, that is critical in assessing whether and how civilian and military authorities elect to treat its use against their own societies not as a crime, but as an act of war. Bioterrorism in turn, as we argue below, has unique attributes that distinguish it from other forms of terrorism.1 And where, for most nations, homeland defense is the primary mission of the armed forces, the United States had to establish a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security due to the primarily expeditionary nature of American armed forces for the past half-century. The military has been a unique institution in modern societies. It has acted as the agent for the state’s possession of a monopoly on the means of large-scale organized violence and war-making. The establishment of a second executive agency responsible for homeland security makes the equation more complex. As a result, ever greater attention must be given to the balance of civil-military relations in American society.