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This paper has two purposes. First, I offer a reading of interpretive biography (Denzin, 1989a) as an alternative method for understanding how individual lives are rendered meaningful in postmodern communication processes. Second, given the importance of many rock performers as cultural heroes, I present an interpretive biography of Pete Townshend, chief songwriter and most visible member of the classic rock band the Who. This method of inquiry is grounded in the more general tradition of interpretive interactionism (Denzin, 1989b, 1990a) and has its roots in C. Wright Mills's (1959) concept of the sociological imagination. Its guiding question is this: How is the postmodern self (or stated more accurately, selves) created within and sustained by the mass media? I argue that as postmodern cultural symbols, Townshend and the band (however ambiguously) mirror a collective search for identity on the part of audiences and society-at-large.

In his important text Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil Katz (1988) provides a powerful phenomenological description of the experience of crime, which is ontologically situated within the social world from which it emerges. As such, the experience of crime is viewed as neither the exclusive psychological artifact of a self-enclosed and finished rational actor or as the epiphenomenal conclusion of a process of a structurally imposed determinism (Katz, 1988). From this perspective, the experience of crime emerges from its specific co-constituted encounter with the social world that both constructs and is constructed by this intertwining of self and the world.

The main theme of this special volume is the colonial state and its governmental practices. This chapter introduces and contextualizes the contributions by providing a brief induction to recent developments within the study of the colonial state. It then presents the contributions under three perspectives which represent separate yet interrelated themes relevant for the understanding of the colonial state: practices, violence, and agency. Hereby, we also accentuate the value of a non-state-centric approach to the analysis of the colonial state.

Critical race theory is a contemporary legal movement composed of progressive scholars, primarily people who identify as people of color, who seek to challenge racism in American society. In their writing, they explore the many ways in which racism infuses American institutions, popular culture, commonsense beliefs, pervades interaction and cuts to the core of the American psyche. One of the central challenges that any person, scholar, activist faces in the U.S. is the peculiar nature of contemporary discourse on race. Often times, much of white America treats racism as if it were a thing of the past, an article of a time when the racial caste system was explicitly upheld and defended, either in the form of slavery, explicitly racist immigration laws (like the Chinese Exclusion Act), the Jim Crow laws, or when Native Americans were massacred by Union soldiers. Contemporary anti-racist work constantly confronts this denial of racism from a large segment of America.² This denial of racism is one in which many people seem to have developed something of a psychic investment. Since the critical race theorists are working in a scholar-activist anti-racist vein, they also have to confront this massive self-delusion or mythic self-understanding.

Purpose – This chapter aims to explore and discuss how women paid and unpaid labor in weaving is positioned in the flexible production chain in the context of local development.

Methodology/approach – It is based on a research11Report on Effects and Results of the Relationships between Manufacturers and Local Weavers on the Local Social Structure: Cases of Mugla/Yesilyurt, Istanbul/Sile and Kastamonu in collaboration with Asuman Turkun-Erendil and supported by Mugla University Research Projects Unit, 2006 (unpublished project report). study, using mainly oral history methods, of three weaving centers in Anatolia in their attempts to achieve local development through the restructuring of their traditional craft.

Findings – This study shows how a flexible production process is organized in ways in which women's labor is almost always positioned as cheap and insecure. In this process, through production of hegemonic discourses, symbolic capital of secure women's work is drastically decreased and that of the production activity itself (weaving) is increased. It also discusses how the state as the main carrier of symbolic violence, plays an important role in expansion of flexible production and informality directly (with its policies applied in its own enterprises) or indirectly (with its policies in general).

Originality/value of paper – By focusing on the mechanisms through women's labor is kept cheap or unpaid in the organization of the entire production process and also on the relationships between women's labor and the state in local development context, critical points for future discussion and policy-making are raised.