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The purpose of this paper is to highlight both the value and critiques of Erving Goffman’s conceptualization of stigma as well as the emotion work needed to learn the lessons it has to teach.

I use a personal narrative grounded in my experience as a member of the “wise” category (the mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy) and observations of the reactions of my disabled students as a vehicle for taking the reader inside the experience of the trials and tribulations of reading Goffman as a member of “marked” social categories and the more humanizing experience of reading Spencer Cahill’s work.

There remains much to be learned from reading Goffman’s Stigma. In many ways his work has set the stage for approaches to the study of disability that we are still discovering. Learning these lessons through is made difficult by the de-humanizing perspective Goffman brings to the work. He clearly locates himself and his readers in the category of “we the normals” who see the stigmatized as “not quite fully human.” For disabled students and scholars and their families, reading Goffman requires a good deal of emotion management. Reading Spencer Cahill’s work can help in that process. Goffman presents disabled students and scholars and their family members with confirmation of what we know to be true about our marked and not quite human status in the eyes of others and in the process gives us our “own.” Cahill helps us all see ourselves in the strangeness that is inside social life. There is great value in both.

Although the commodification of black bodies amid state violence and widespread racism is nothing new, considering the histories of Hollywood, jazz, minstrelsy, or even athletes enslaved on plantations (Rhoden, 2006), the hyper commodification of the contemporary black athlete, alongside expansive processes of globalization, growth in the profitability of black bodies, and their importance within colorblind discourse, demonstrates the importance of commodification within our new racist moment. Likewise, the shrinking opportunities afforded to African American youth, alongside clear messages about the path to desired black masculinity (Neal, 2005; Watkins, 1998; West, 1994), push black youth into a sports world where the possibility of striking it rich leads to a “win at all costs” attitude. Robin Kelley argues that African American youth participate in sports or engage in other cultural practices as an attempt to resist or negotiate the inherent contradictions of post-industrial American capitalism (Kelley, 1998). Patricia Hill Collins describes this process in the following terms: “Recognizing that black culture was a marketable commodity, they put it up for sale, selling an essentialized black culture that white youth could emulate yet never own. These message was clear – ‘the world may be against us, but we are here and we intend to get paid’” (Collins, 2006, p. 298). Celia Lury concurs, noting that heightened levels of commodification embody a shift from a racial logic defined by scientific racism to one centering on cultural difference. She argues that commodity racism “has contributed to shifts in how racism operates, specifically to the shift from a racism tied to biological understandings of ‘race’ in which identity is fixed or naturalized to a racism in which ‘race’ is a cultural category in which racial identity is represented as a matter of style, and is the subject of choice” (Lury, 1996, p. 169; as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). In the context of new racism, as manifested in heightened levels of commodification of Othered bodies, racial identity is simply a choice, but a cultural marker that can be celebrated and sold, policed, or demonized with little questions about racial implications (Spencer, 2004, pp. 123–125). Blackness, thus, becomes little more than a culture style, something that can be sold on Ebay and tried on at the ball or some something that needs to be policed or driven out-of-existence. Race is conceptualized “as a matter of style, something that can be put on or taken off at will” (Willis as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). Collins notes further that the process of commodification is not simply about selling “an essentialized black culture,” but rather a particular construction of blackness that has proven beneficial to white owners. “Athletes and criminals alike are profitable, not for the vast majority of African American men, but for people who own the teams, control the media, provide food, clothing and telephone services, and who consume seemingly endless images of pimps, hustlers, rapists, and felons” (2006, p. 311). bell hooks, who describes this process as “eating the other,” sees profit and ideology as crucial to understanding the commodification of black bodies. “When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races…affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the other” (Hooks, 1992, p. 23). She, along with Collins, emphasizes the importance of sex and sexuality, within this processes of commodification, arguing that commodification of black male (and female) bodies emanates from and reproduces longstanding mythologies regarding black sexual power.

In this chapter we investigate the ownership and control of UK firms using contemporary methods from computational graph theory. Specifically, we analyze a ‘small-world’ model of ownership and control. A small-world is a network whose actors are linked by a short chain of acquaintances (short path lengths), but at the same time have a strongly overlapping circle of friends (high clustering). We simulate a set of corporate worlds using an ensemble of random graphs introduced by Chung and Lu (2002a, 2002b). We find that the corporate governance network structures analyzed here are more clustered (‘clubby’) than would be predicted by the random-graph model. Path lengths, though, are generally not shorter than expected. In addition, we investigate the role of financial institutions: potentially important conduits creating connectivity in corporate networks. We find such institutions give rise to systematically different network topologies.

Occupational stress is common in the workplace and leads to various negative outcomes such as burnout, turnover, and medical problems. Although occupational stress is associated with negative connotations, it also can foster workplace resiliency. Workplace resiliency involves the ability to recover quickly in the face of adversity. Emotionally laborious jobs, or jobs in which employees must modify, manage, or regulate their emotions as part of their work role, are inherently stressful. Thus, such jobs, while stress-inducing, may also offer employees opportunities to become more resilient at work. Currently, display rules, rules encouraging the suppression and expression of certain emotions, dictate workplace emotions and thus, interactions. Ultimately, display rule adherence makes it difficult for employees engaging in emotional labor to build resilience. In this chapter, the authors detail how and when emotional labor encounters lead to episodic and prolonged workplace resilience. Specifically, the authors outline instances in which employees engaging in emotional labor can create and sustain workplace resiliency by not deploying an acting strategy and instead, breaking character. The authors further discuss individual and organizational factors that may impact this process as well such as personality and organizational culture that serve as potential boundary conditions to workplace resilience capacity. The authors conclude with implications for both researchers and practitioners.

On many occasions, organizational science research has been referred to as fragmented and disjointed, resulting in a literature that is, in the opinion of many, difficult to navigate and comprehend. One potential explanation is that scholars have failed to comprehend that organizations are complex and intricate systems. In order to move us past this morass, we recommend that researchers extend beyond traditional rational, mechanistic, and variable-centered approaches to research and integrate a more advantageous pattern-oriented approach within their research program. Pattern-oriented methods approximate real-life phenomena by adopting a holistic, integrative approach to research wherein individual- and organizational-systems are viewed as non-decomposable organized wholes. We argue that the pattern-oriented approach has the potential to overcome a number of breakdowns faced by alternate approaches, while offering a novel and more representative lens from which to view organizational- and HRM-related issues. The proposed incorporation of the pattern-oriented approach is framed within a review and evaluation of current approaches to organizational research and is supplemented with a discussion of methodological and theoretical implications as well as potential applications of the pattern-oriented approach.

Balance Theory has accumulated an impressive record of empirical confirmation at both the micro- and macro-levels. Yet, it is unclear why humans consistently prefer balanced relations when imbalance offers the opportunity to reap material rewards. We argue that balance is preferred because it functions as a “compression heuristic,” allowing networks to be more easily encoded in, and recalled from, memory.

We present the results of a novel randomized laboratory experiment using nearly 300 subjects. We evaluate the independent and joint effects of degree of balance/imbalance and presence/absence of kin compression heuristics on network recall.

We find that memory for relationship valence is more accurate for balanced, rather than imbalanced, networks and that relationship existence and relationship valence are separable cognitive elements. We also use comparisons between kin and non-kin networks to suggest that humans are implicitly aware of the conditions under which imbalanced networks will be most durable.

We show that the tension/strain postulated to generate mental and behavioral responses to increase balance likely stems from cognitive limitations. More broadly, this connects balance theory to models of human cognition and evolution and suggests that human general processing ability may have evolved in response to social, rather than physical, challenges.

This paper evaluates the modern baseline presumption of nonconsent in sexual assault (rape) cases in light of different theories of sexuality (feminism on the one hand and sex positivism/queer theory on the other) and in light of how sexuality manifests itself in the lives of contemporary young women. The authors analyze social science literature on contemporary heterosexual practices such as sexting and hook-ups, as well as contemporary media imagery, to inform a contemporary understanding of the ways in which young people perceive and experience sex. Using this evidence as a foundation, the authors reconsider the ongoing utility of a baseline presumption of nonconsent in sexual assault cases. This paper demonstrates the complex relationship between women’s sexual autonomy, the contemporary culture’s encouragement of women’s celebration of their own sexual objectification and the persistence of high rates of unwanted sex. In the end, it demonstrates why a legal presumption against consent may neither reduce the rate of nonconsensual sex, nor raise the rate of reported rapes. At the same time, it shows how the presumption itself is unlikely to generate harmful consequences: if it deters anything, it likely deters unwanted sex, whether consented to or not.

Teaching about development contains a basic contradiction. The issues are even more stark when we consider that gender disruptions are always a part of the discontinuities in any development process. Students and text books often assume that women are being suppressed and it is a task of development workers to “free” women from “traditional” oppression.

Here the author explores some of the contradictions inevitably part of Development Anthropology. On the one hand, the development worker’s etic vision of problems to be solved by “development” controls discussion in the classroom and the transfer of resources to the field. On the other hand, ordinary villagers’ or urbanites’ emic vision of what is happening in the socio-­cultural system as it faces pressures to “develop” hold sway in field contexts, as well as in their classroom analysis. The author needs to bring the realities of field settings into the pedagogical setting.

Application and pedagogy tend to interpenetrate; there is no clear boundary. Relying on discussions of the pedagogical problems, the author explores some of the discontinuities to be found in a gendered vision of development. The author stresses the problems highlighted by the educational environment in which students frequently first encounter these issues. The ultimate goal of this study is to make clear that teaching about or engaging in development do not have sharp boundaries and cannot be accomplished within the confines of a value-free paradigm. Every decision in this area involves a meeting of emic and etic visions and the value systems that arise from them.