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1 – 10 of 859Stefanie Ruel, Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills
The authors focus on “writing women into ‘history’” in this study, embracing the notion of cisgender and ethnicity in relation to the “historic turn”. As such, the authors bring…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors focus on “writing women into ‘history’” in this study, embracing the notion of cisgender and ethnicity in relation to the “historic turn”. As such, the authors bring forward the stories of the US Pan American Airway’s Guided Missile Range Division (GMRD) and the White women who worked there. The authors ask what has a Cold War US missile division to tell us about present and future gendered relationships in the North American space industry.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply Foucault’s technology of lamination, a form of critical discourse analysis, to both narrative texts and photographic images in the GMRD’s in-house newsletter, the Clipper, dating from 1964 until the end of 1967. They meld an autoethnography to this technique, providing space for the first author to share her experiences within the contemporary space industry in relation to the GMRD White women experiences.
Findings
The authors surface, in applying this combined methodology, a story about a White women’s historical, present and future cisgender social reality in the North American space industry. They are contributing then to a multi-voiced, cisgender/ethnic “historic turn” that, to date, is focused on White men alone in the US race to the moon.
Social implications
The social implication of this study lies in challenging perceptions of the masculinist-gendering of the past by bringing forward tales of, and by, women. This study also brings a White woman’s voice forward, within a contemporary North American space industry organization.
Originality/value
The authors are making a three-fold contribution to this special issue, and to an understandings of gendered/ethnic multi-voiced histories. The authors untangle the mid-Cold War phase from the essentialized Cold War era. They recreate multi-voiced histories of White women within the North American space industry while adding an important contemporary voice. They also present a novel methodology that combines the technology of lamination with autoethnography, to provide a gateway to recognizing the impact of multi-voiced histories onto contemporary and future gendered/ethnic relationships.
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Against the prevalent assumption that the United States is and has been a nation-state, this article proposes to reconceptualize it as an empire-state, a state encompassing…
Abstract
Against the prevalent assumption that the United States is and has been a nation-state, this article proposes to reconceptualize it as an empire-state, a state encompassing hierarchically differentiated spaces and peoples. In addition to being descriptively more apt, an empire-state approach provides a firmer basis for understanding the United States as a racial state, a state of white supremacy. Drawing on evidence from constitutional law, I examine the early development of the U.S. empire-state, the long 19th century. The article demonstrates how U.S. state formation has always entailed the racial construction of colonial spaces, specifically “territories” and American Indian lands. Through an extended consideration of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 Supreme Court case associated almost exclusively with African Americans and hardly ever with empire, I argue for a unified framework to analyze the different but linked racial subjections of colonized and noncolonized peoples. The article concludes with several implications of an empire-state approach to the United States.
This chapter contributes to the field of educational standardisation by critically discussing the recent preoccupation with social and emotional abilities as performance standards…
Abstract
This chapter contributes to the field of educational standardisation by critically discussing the recent preoccupation with social and emotional abilities as performance standards in education policies and curriculum. The chapter is philosophical-theoretical in scope and sheds light on standardisation of social and emotional abilities through the different theoretical layers of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. By bringing the writings of the late Foucault to the fore, I will argue that the power structures imbued in social and emotional standards are not merely oppressive and vertical structures of subjection, but can also be seen as enabling, relational and productive means for subjectivation. Thus, although social and emotional standards certainly can be seen as governmental measures in the production of a flexible, diligent, self-managing workforce, ensuring the kind of transferable non-cognitive skills that are so much needed in the knowledge economy, educators can ambiguously also construct public spaces for political-ethical self-creation and resistance in context of these ‘standards of the self’.
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Today, there is the real possibility that self-management and workplace democracy will follow socialism into the dustbin of history. But the connection of self-management to…
Abstract
Today, there is the real possibility that self-management and workplace democracy will follow socialism into the dustbin of history. But the connection of self-management to socialism was misconceived from the beginning. Workplace democracy has its own roots in the historical struggle against slavery and against autocracy. The paper reviews the history of the theory of inalienable rights that applies not only against the self-sale contract and the political contract of subjection but also against of the self-rental or employment contract, today's contract of subjection for the workplace. The paper concludes with the current debate about corporate governance.
The work of Michel Foucault is taken as inspiration for a study of the organizational field of asylums, prisons, orphanages, and other carceral organizations operating in New York…
Abstract
The work of Michel Foucault is taken as inspiration for a study of the organizational field of asylums, prisons, orphanages, and other carceral organizations operating in New York City in 1888. Foucault argues that institutional power is organized into dually ordered system of truth and power. Using text data describing the clients and institutional technologies (organizational “power signatures”) of 168 organizations, we apply structural equivalence methods to unpack speech activity, showing that as Foucault suggests, there may be dually ordered sub-domains of truth and power that help define the underlying logic of this institutional field.
This paper outlines and exemplifies the use of a method for analysing power relations based on the work of French social theorist, Michel Foucault. The overall research aim of…
Abstract
This paper outlines and exemplifies the use of a method for analysing power relations based on the work of French social theorist, Michel Foucault. The overall research aim of genealogical analysis is to produce “a history of the present”, a history which is essentially critical with its focus on locating forms of power, the channels it takes and the discourses it permeates. Research combining Foucauldian theorisation and method necessarily involves a selective search for injustice and subjection to reveal plausible alternatives to more pervasively modernist histories, which tend to revere progress. Salient features of a genealogical research method are detailed in the context of an actual research project previously conducted by the authors and reproduced here for the purposes of exemplification explicitly as a genealogy.
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The aim of this paper is to focus on Rousseau's three major works: the epistolary novel Julia. Or, The New Eloisa, one of the eighteenth century's best sellers, the political…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to focus on Rousseau's three major works: the epistolary novel Julia. Or, The New Eloisa, one of the eighteenth century's best sellers, the political essay The Social Contract, and the pedagogical treatise Emile: or On Education. It seeks to explore the innovative management theories Rousseau develops as he embarks in the simultaneous composition of these three major works, particularly as he conceptualizes his ideal society and envisions a brand new political system, one that would take into account the natural state of humankind in order to socialize them more efficiently.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper explores Rousseau's solution to these obstacles, and examines his understanding of censorship, as well as the surreptitious control of people's values, tastes, and aspirations. His vision of humanity is very similar to that of “a machine to be put together by skillful devices”, assuming “that the materials of which it is composed are colorless and lifeless”.
Findings
The conclusions reached in this paper hinge upon, in significant part, Rousseau's approach to management science, and the individual's subjection to authority, as well as the overarching necessity for any form of power to be imperceptible.
Originality/value
The paper shows that in Rousseau's mind, people are mere pawns on the political chessboard, “to be arranged by the fancy of the legislator.”
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Amartya Sen’s notion of adaptation and his views on identity politics by focussing on the issue of slavery and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Amartya Sen’s notion of adaptation and his views on identity politics by focussing on the issue of slavery and, more specifically, on the example of the happy or contented slave.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is text based. The methodological approach adopted is that of conceptual analysis, as is typical for work of this kind.
Findings
The paper concludes that the example of the happy or contented slave is indeed a fruitful one for those interested in exploring the relationship between Sen’s views on “the adaptation problem” and his views on identity politics, especially in relation to the subjection of women. Here Sen’s debt to the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill is particularly important.
Research limitations/implications
One implication of the argument of the paper is that there is a need to consider more carefully the differences that exist between the views of Wollstonecraft and Mill, so far as the example of the happy or contented slave is concerned.
Practical implications
One practical implication of the paper is that, hopefully, it establishes the continued relevance of the ideas of thinkers such as Wollstonecraft and Mill today, not least because of the influence that they have had on theoreticians such as Amartya Sen.
Social implications
The paper addresses issues which are of considerable social and political significance, especially for women in underdeveloped societies today.
Originality/value
The example of the happy or contented slave has not received much discussion in the literature on Sen, although Sen himself has suggested that the distinction between happiness and contentment is an important one, which does merit further discussion.
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