Search results

Few scholars become notable figures in their areas of specialization. Understanding how and why some scholars are identified by their unusual accomplishments, therefore, can be difficult, especially when some scholars achieve more notable careers and are invisible in their professions than others, more recognized colleagues. The reasons for some scholars’ visibility and their colleagues’ invisibility may be unclear or ambiguous. One common reason for invisibility is being a woman in a patriarchal discipline. Men’s ideas, values, and careers are privileged and more highly rated in a patriarchal subject like sociology.

Here, I analyze case studies of invisibility that emerge from deliberate suppression but focus on the more hidden processes of making women invisible in sociology. These less overt processes of invisibility require different theories, networks, and methods to discover the women’s notable careers than those used in examples of more overt processes.

Making invisible women visible requires multiple processes, over time, by a number of professionals and gatekeepers.

Purpose and approach – This chapter by the editors introduces the concepts that feature most prominently in the volume and relates the contributed chapters to one another in terms of concepts, themes, and methods.

Research implications – The viability of the concept of intersectionality and its applicability to a wide range of local and global questions raised by feminist scholars as well as the fruitfulness of applying the concept in studies employing a wide range of the methodologies currently used in the social sciences and humanities is demonstrated. Attention is called to the need to study violence, including symbolic violence, more fully and to pay attention to paradoxical findings.

Value of chapter – This chapter serves to guide the reader through the volume calling attention to key findings and methodological issues.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the experiences of air passengers in the airside setting of commercial airports. Whilst the concept of liminality has found increased interest in tourism studies, only few studies have contextualized the airside experience as a liminal one. We investigate the role of food and beverage (F&B) consumption in this context as well as factors influencing F&B outlet patronage intentions. Using a European non-hub commercial airport as practical unit, we applied a mixed methods single case-study methodology to investigate F&B outlet choice in the airside setting. It becomes evident that perceptions of liminality play an important role in this context. Findings support the claim that the airport environment constitutes a special context, an encapsuled or protected space; not only for passengers, but also for employees alike. Whilst airports have a certain uniformity to regular travelers, infrequent travelers perceive air travel as an extraordinary activity, often paired with a certain uncertainty about related procedures. Evidence suggests that passengers’ emotional states play a key role in consumption decisions. Depending on travel purpose and direction, passengers showed differing consumption behaviors.

Understanding the airport airside area as a liminoid space and using the concept of boundary work for the transition between home and work realms (and back again) thus serves as a suitable frame of reference to help understand the phenomena that were observed and analyzed in this study. F&B consumption can then be understood to support the mental transition between home and work realms. Our findings thus allow linking the passenger clusters’ different consumption behavior to prevailing emotional states in their transgressions between work and home realm in the liminoid airside context.

Purpose – This chapter addresses the interconnections between the development of feminism and the role of the nation-state, with particular reference to Canada. The general trajectory of Canadian feminism has much in common with the rest of the world, but it also has unique features that relate to Canada's proximity to the United States and to its lingering ties to the European colonial powers of Britain and France.

Approach – I cover the emergence and development of feminism in the academy in the context of Canadian political structures in two time periods; the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, which I see as a period of growth and promise, and the period of setbacks and challenges from the 1980s to the present.

Findings – Despite the setbacks, the challenges that confront feminism today, both nationally and globally, present opportunities to advance the goal of gender equity that has historically energized feminist actions in all arenas of social life.

Value of the chapter – The chapter contributes to the historical archives dealing with feminist activity in Canada in the second half of the 20th century.

The purpose of this paper is to address two questions: how do business and political (i.e. party politics and state) networks relate? What are the consequences of the relations between these two networks for the behaviour of the actors involved?

The research design consists of the historical approach based on relevant literature sources of the past, a relatively long period – from 1968, the beginning of the era of market socialism, until the first decade of the twenty-first century, by which time the market economy had been established for more than 20 years. The authors analyse the behaviour of economic and non-economic actors in Hungary based on cases and historical data, applying the IMP network approach.

Research findings demonstrate the long-term influence of the relation between business and bureaucratic networks on managerial and organizational network behaviour. The old and new pictures of the economic system are different, but the background to the pictures and the movement in the two pictures are quite similar.

The historical illustrations and cases the authors have presented cannot be too widely generalized: the characteristics of the Hungarian mode of transition from market socialism to market economy impose important limitations on the generalizability of the findings.

The study offers lessons to policy makers: policy decisions can have long term, unanticipated impacts on non-target areas as well.

The results confirm that the informal networks of socialism can replicate themselves and network structures can be repurposed in the system after the transition as well.

One contribution of the paper is related to the second network paradox: the cases illustrate non-business relationships with non-economic factors, particularly relations with bureaucracy. The other contribution is the description of how the transition from socialism to capitalism affected the networks that firms were embedded in before and after the transition.

The paper aims to find out how far the size of household landholding directs patriarchal traits and thus influence women's autonomy.

The study used a two-part methodology. The first part provides theoretical background based on existing literature on women's autonomy and related information in formulating the “landholding-patriarchy hypotheses”. The second part of this study evaluates the empirical evidences of the association between the size of household landholding and women's autonomy.

Results indicate considerable variation in women's autonomy with the size of their household landholding: women's autonomy decreases with increasing size of household landholding. Evidence suggests that landholding directs patriarchal traits, as manifested in a reasonable influence on women's autonomy in rural India.

The paper innovates a means to understand the contributing factors to lowering women's autonomy, thus explore the relevance of “landholding-patriarchy hypothesis”.

Rifat Akhter is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Central Arkansas. Her research interests are globalization, gender, violence against women, and health. She obtained her Masters in Medical Demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and PhD in Sociology from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her current research explores the impacts of the global economy and gender empowerment on domestic violence against women.