Search results

The purpose of this paper is to problematise the application of hegemonic masculinity to police practice and culture.

This paper offers a viewpoint and is a discussion paper critiquing the application of hegemonic masculinity to police officers, their practice and culture.

The paper suggests that a broader conceptualisation of masculinity, offered by scholars such as Demetriou (2001), is required when considering policing and its culture, in order to more accurately reflect the activity and those involved in it.

Writings concerning police practice and culture, both in the media and academic discourse, are questionable due to the application of hegemonic masculinity. The application of hegemonic masculinity can create a biased perception of policing and police officers.

The paper helps to engender a more accurate and balanced examination of the police, their culture and practice when writing about policing institutions and encourage social institutions such as academia to address bias in their examination of policing institutions and police officers.

There has been limited consideration in regards to multiple masculinities, police practice and culture.

Discussions of political ethics, and of the problem of dirty hands, often cite Max Weber’s comments on these subjects, especially as presented in “Politics as a vocation”. Offers an interpretation of Weber’s views by explaining why he focused on the political leader as the proper subject of political morality, why he deemed certain personal qualities essential to responsible leadership, how he conceived the relationship between ethics and politics, and why he believed the problem of dirty hands to be both inescapable and unresolvable. Advances the central claims that Weber conceived political ethics as the attempt to reconcile ethical with political duties, and dirty hands as the inevitable accompaniment of political action because of its unavoidable association with violence and the partiality of its ends.

In this paper, the possibility of a renewed ethics of the role of the physician is explored by appeal to the Hippocratic tradition. The Hippocratic Oath, in its many permutations, offers a unique historical example of a document that marks the boundary-crossing of the physician-in-training into the office of physician, properly speaking. In making the Oath, the physician or physician-in-training enters into a new maturity that develops out of his or her own subjective desires and constructs, through to an outlook that is bound to a transcendent ideal of both technical acumen in the chosen profession of the physician, but also in a zeal for that which is good or virtuous. In other words, the Hippocratic tradition focuses the maker of the Oath upon a moral good; both for the physician and also for the patient. It may be years of practice and reflection before the significance of the Oath is realised in any particular medical professional. The Hippocratic tradition calls physician and patient alike towards a higher, but also more realist sense of virtue – in its ordinary and everyday sense, and the manner in which the good may be perceived even in the messiest of life and death conundrums. In this sense, a Hippocratic ethics of the physician might be possible that shows how the notion of ‘dirty hands’ is misleading, but also promising, in terms of the ethical possibilities for renewed notion of the virtuous physician.

The public image of a profession is an important barometer of the group’s status in society. Media images play a key role in this respect, projecting the ideas and values of the group and negotiating shifts in public perception of their identity. This paper focuses on two periods in Britain when shifts in managerial culture resulted in changes in the core values of the group; the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 and the introduction of the internal market within the NHS in the late 1980s. In both periods, nursing leaders sought to change the public image of the profession through altering their relationship with their patients/clients and reconceptualising notions of service. The focus of analysis is the role of popular film and television images in negotiating these shifts in professional values.

Few will complain that 1974 has not been an eventful year; in a number of significant respects, it has made history. Local Government and National Health Services reorganizations are such events. This is indeed the day of the extra‐large authority, massive monoliths for central administration, metropolitan conurbations for regional control, district councils corresponding to the large authorities of other days; and in a sense, it is not local government any more. As in other fields, the “big batallions” acquire greater collective power than the total sum of the smaller units, can wield it more effectively, even ruthlessly, but rarely appearing to take into account the masses of little people, the quiet people, who cannot make themselves heard. As expected, new names of authorities are replacing the old; new titles for departments and officers, ambitious and high‐sounding; a little grandiose for the tongues of ordinary folk. Another history‐making event of 1974, in the nature of a departmental transfer but highly significant for the course of future events as far as work in the field is concerned, was handing over of the personal health services—health of expectant mothers, babies, children, domiciliary midwifery, the school health services and their mainly medical and nursing personnel—from local health authorities to the newly created area health authorities. The public health departments over fifty years and more had created them, built them up into the highly efficient services they are. If anything can be learned from the past, new authorities are always more expensive than those they replace; they spend freely and are lavish with their accommodation and furnishings. In their first few months of existence, the new bodies have proved they are no exception. News of their meetings and activities in many areas is now scanty; even local newspapers which usually thrive on Council news—or quarrels—seem to have been caught on the wrong foot, especially in the small towns now merged into larger units. The public are relatively uninformed, but this doubtless will soon be rectified.

Using the canvas of the author’s sojourn with the Islamic preaching group Tablighi Jamaat, this study aims to exhibit reflections on how spaces can be categorized as more sacred or less sacred according to a specific religious worldview. The paper extends the conversation on Mary Douglas’s concepts of purity and danger by sharpening the focal lens on place in Douglas’s theoretics. The paper also proffers the idea of a sojourn as a vehicle of purification.

This paper depicts findings from the author’s multi-sited ethnographic field notes carried out from a 40-day sojourn with the Islamic preaching group Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan.

The study unveils the concept of relative sacredness or how some spaces can be considered more sacred than others. The differential sacred status of these variegated spaces, each with its own etiquettes, meaning and consumption rituals is a means for purification for sojourners.

This paper prioritizes a focus on place in Mary Douglas’s arguments on purity and impurity in a religious consumption context. The thesis argues that place is a significant concept associated with metaphorical cleanliness/sacredness, which in religious terms guides consumer action.

Democracies typically impose onerous regulation on the conduct of bureaucratic officials and remarkably light regulation of the conduct of elected officials. The traditional presumption was that politicians should be allowed to self-regulate. In many democratic regimes, politicians have shown themselves unable to carry this burden of public trust. As a result, political ethics is regulated from a perspective of public distrust, associated with fears of political corruption. Despite my personal reservations about professional ethics models (recorded here by reference to recent fictional work of novelist J.M. Coetzee), I revive a trust-based perspective to make a case for a regime of self-regulation for democratic politicians, based on a democratic hope that politicians can be trusted to act as responsible professionals.

As the social scientists of modern society, sociologists find themselves in a peculiar situation. Human civilization appears on the brink of collapse; the ravages of global capitalism are turning natural and social orders upside down. Some theorists are declaring the “end of history,” while others wonder if humans will soon become extinct. People find themselves increasingly shouldering burdens on their own, strangers to themselves and others. Struggles for recognition and identity are forged in harsh landscapes of social dislocation and inequality. The relationship of the individual to the state atrophies as governmental power becomes at once more remote and absolutely terrifying. How are we as sociologists expected to theorize under such circumstances?  What implications result for the mission of sociology as a discipline and area of study? What political initiatives, if any, can counter these trends?

This chapter provides an immanent critique of sociology as a profession, vocation, and critical practice. Sociology today (in the US and around the globe) faces fierce social, economic, and political headwinds. The discipline continues to be a perilous choice as a vocation for independent researchers as much as the shrinking professoriate. Yet while the traditional functions of sociology are thrown into doubt, there has been an increase in critical practices on the part of some sociologists. As institutional norms, values, and traditions continue to be challenged, there will be passionate debates about the production of social worlds and the validity claims involved in such creation. Sociologists must play an active role in such discourse. Sociology is needed today as a mode of intervention as much as occupational status system or method of inquiry.

The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible alternatives. We need the vision and the courage to aim for the highest level of technology attainable for the widest possible use in both industry and services. We need financial arrangements that will encourage people to invent themselves out of work. Our goal, the article argues, must be the reduction of human labour to the greatest extent possible, to free people for more enjoyable, creative, human activities.

Caste is the basic structural feature of Hindu society; all social scientists are agreed on this. Since Hinduism is generally recognised to be as much a social system as a religion, its social framework embodying caste rituals has governed the lives of the majority of Indians for hundreds of years. Having deep roots in tradition and enjoying sanction in all religious literature belonging to the pre‐British era, caste has been the dominant principle of social organisation since ancient times. In fact, barring the recent past, Hinduism has always been identified in the minds of most Indians with caste observances. Writes R.C. Zaehner: “…until a century or so ago the acceptance of the caste system was considered by the orthodox to be the sole effective criterion of whether one was or was not a Hindu. In matters of belief it mattered not at all whether one believed in one god or many, or not at all, nor did it much matter on how one interpreted ‘liberation’ or whether one rejected it outright so long as one fulfilled the duties prescribed for one's caste.”