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1 – 10 of 700With an aim to investigate the recent state of the feminist clinics and their negotiation of medical authority in a time of increased technoscientific biomedicalization, and…
Abstract
With an aim to investigate the recent state of the feminist clinics and their negotiation of medical authority in a time of increased technoscientific biomedicalization, and capitalistic health-care system, I conducted a study of two feminist health centers in the Northeast of the United States in 2001–2002. In this chapter, I discuss how the two centers (a nonprofit collective and a for-profit center with a more hierarchical structure) negotiated medical authority in organizational terms as impacted by the larger context of medicine and its interaction with the state, capitalist health-care system, and antiabortion forces. The chapter concludes with a discussion of demedicalization as a multilevel process and implications for feminist care (service delivery) and U.S. Women's Health Movement.
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In 1920 Margaret Sanger called voluntary motherhood “the key to the temple of liberty” and noted that women were “rising in fundamental revolt” to claim their right to determine…
Abstract
In 1920 Margaret Sanger called voluntary motherhood “the key to the temple of liberty” and noted that women were “rising in fundamental revolt” to claim their right to determine their own reproductive fate (Rothman, 2000, p. 73). Decades later Barbara Katz Rothman reflected on the social, political and legal changes produced by reproductive-rights feminists since that time. She wrote: So the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1970s won, and abortion is available – just as the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1920s won, and contraception is available. But in another sense, we did not win. We did not win, could not win, because Sanger was right. What we really wanted was the fundamental revolt, the “key to the temple of liberty.” A doctor’s fitting for a diaphragm, or a clinic appointment for an abortion, is not the revolution. It is not even a woman-centered approach to reproduction (2000, p. 79).
Beth Sundstrom, Rowena Lyn Briones and Melissa Janoske
The purpose of this paper is to explore a postmodern approach to crisis management through the lens of complexity theory to understand six non-profit organizations’ communication…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore a postmodern approach to crisis management through the lens of complexity theory to understand six non-profit organizations’ communication responses to anti-abortion terrorism.
Design/methodology/approach
Researchers conducted a qualitative content analysis of publicly available documents from six non-profit organizations, which included 62 news releases and statements on organization web sites, 152 tweets, and 63 articles in national and local newspapers.
Findings
A history of violence and rituals of remembrance emerged as important pieces of organizational, personal, and social history surrounding anti-abortion terrorism. The process of self-organization facilitated calling publics to action and combating the “terrorism” naming problem. The non-profits’ dynamic environment exemplified the importance of coalition building to construct digital attractor basins, or networks extending beyond permeable boundaries, through a variety of strategies, including new media. Twitter served as a strange attractor, where the concept of interacting agents emerged as a key component of relationship building.
Research limitations/implications
Findings provide opportunities to expand complexity theory.
Practical implications
Findings suggest practical implications for anti-abortion counterterrorism and crisis management, and provide opportunities to develop communication counter measures.
Originality/value
Applying a complexity lens to the study of anti-abortion counterterrorism builds on the growing emphasis of the postmodern approach to crisis management and answers the call for further inquiry into the application of complexity theory to crisis situations. Furthermore, this study fills a gap in the study of crisis management by investigating how multiple organizations handle a crisis.
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David S. Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg
Activists make strategic decisions about how to pursue their claims, but strategy is hard to study and the topic is underdeveloped theoretically. Here, we contribute to the…
Abstract
Activists make strategic decisions about how to pursue their claims, but strategy is hard to study and the topic is underdeveloped theoretically. Here, we contribute to the developing academic literature on social movement strategy by offering a theoretical framework that emphasizes three distinct, albeit interrelated, movement choices: arenas of action, advocacy tactics, and demands. This framework allows us to infer strategy at the movement level through the analysis of events data. Using events data from the New York Times from 1959 to 1996, in conjunction with historical accounts of abortion politics in the United States, we analyze the development of the strategies of the anti-abortion and abortion rights movements. We demonstrate the utility of this framework, and show how movement strategies are affected by both political opportunities and the actions of countermovements, whose activists respond to the same political opportunities. We conclude with a discussion of the complications of assessing movement strategy and call for more research on the topic.
Kelum Jayasinghe Dennis Thomas and Danture Wickramasinghe
The purpose of this paper is to advocate the employment of “bounded emotionality”, as borrowed from organisational studies on emotionality, as an alternative framework to examine…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to advocate the employment of “bounded emotionality”, as borrowed from organisational studies on emotionality, as an alternative framework to examine and understand entrepreneurial behaviour and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors review the debate and trends in entrepreneurship research with particular regard to structure and agency. They then argue that the application of Mumby and Putnam's concept of “bounded emotionality” strengthens the critical tradition and particularly contributes to that strand which utilises Giddens' structuration theory by explicitly treating the emotional aspects of entrepreneurial behaviour that operate outside the consciousness of individual agency.
Findings
The adoption of an alternative methodological framework, involving “bounded emotionality”, within a broad socio‐cutural and political‐economic perspective, can assist policy makers to rethink their generalised approach to the design and implementation of specific programmes and initiatives to support entrepreneurial development in favour of devising alternative approaches to fit particular contexts and localised settings.
Research limitations/implications
This theoretical paper contributes to the critical debate in entrepreneurial research, which advocates the need for an alternative, more socialised approach that attempts to account for the relationship between social structure and individual entrepreneurial action.
Originality/value
The paper contains the first attempt to apply the concept of “bounded rationality” to entrepreneurship research.
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Susan Markens, Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong and Miranda R. Waggoner
This chapter questions the role of virtues in health professional medical ethics. It distinguishes between the ethics of conduct – usually expressed as moral principles – and the…
Abstract
This chapter questions the role of virtues in health professional medical ethics. It distinguishes between the ethics of conduct – usually expressed as moral principles – and the ethics of the character – expressed as virtues. It questions whether virtues are intrinsically valued or valued instrumentally as the means to right conduct. It poses two problems for virtue theory: (1) The “naked virtue” problem – whether instilling virtues increases the probability of correlative morally right conduct, and (2) the “wrong virtue” problem–which of many sometimes controversial virtues should be promoted. The chapter ends by arguing that these are less serious problems for the morality of conduct.
This chapter considers some of the divergent outcomes of youth mobilization and participation in offline spaces, particularly in the youth nonprofit. Critics of youth online…
Abstract
This chapter considers some of the divergent outcomes of youth mobilization and participation in offline spaces, particularly in the youth nonprofit. Critics of youth online political participation detail several shortcomings of online activism as compared to offline activism, but in so doing, these critics venerate offline activism as a utopic alternative. Based on qualitative research in three organizations that mobilize youth around issues of education reform, this chapter demonstrates that the offline youth activist nonprofit fosters political power among some youth while burning out other youth. For teenage activists, these nonprofit organizations offer political education, institutional leverage, and foster political efficacy. At the same time, older youth organizers who are paid staff in these same organizations struggle with having to reign in the radicalism of the youth they mentor, while performing invisible labor around the demands of their organizational funders. These organizational pressures work to burn out youth organizers and steer them away from politics. Online forms of youth activism bring about outcomes that both enhance the political capacities of youth as well as hinder their potential to transform social injustices. Far from utopic, offline movement contexts also foster these contradictory outcomes and should be considered more critically in the debates over the merits of offline versus online activism.