Situational variation in moral judgment: In a stage or on a stage?

Two issues were examined in this study—the consistency of moral judgment across different types of dilemma and different social contexts, and the relationship between the structure (stage) of moral judgment and the content of moral decisions. Forty subjects were given two hypothetical dilemmas about business decisions and two standard Kohlberg dilemmas. Half the subjects directed their responses to a business audience, half to a philosophical audience. Responses to the moral dilemmas were scored in accordance with the Colby and Kohlberg (1987) scoring manual. Stage of moral reasoning was found to be significantly higher on the Kohlberg dilemmas than on the business dilemmas. A significant interaction between type of dilemma and audience was attributed to the tendency of subjects directing their responses to a business audience to interpret one of the business dilemmas in terms of the moral order of business, but for subjects directing their responses to a philosophy audience to treat it as a philosophical dilemma. The other business dilemma evoked uniformly low-level moral judgments. The amount of selfishness intrinsic in subjects' moral choices on the business dilemmas was significantly negatively correlated with moral maturity on the business dilemmas, but not with their moral maturity on Kohlberg's test. These results are interpreted as more consistent with models of moral development such as those advanced by C. G. Levine ([1979] Stage Acquisition and Stage Use: An Appraisal of Stage Displacement Explanations of Variation in Moral Reasoning, Human Development, Vol. 22, pp. 145–164), J. Rest ([1983] Morality, in: P. H. Mussen [ed.], J. H. Flavell and E. Markman [Vol. eds.], Handbook of Child Psychology [Vol. 3, 4th ed.], John Wiley & Sons, New York), and R. Harré ([1984]) Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts), which posit a relatively wide range of within-person stage use and emphasize the determining power of social situations, than with the more constructivistic model of moral development of Colby and Kohlberg (1987).This research was supported by Grant No. 410-87-1115 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Received B.A. and M.A from Simon Fraser University. Research interests include moral development, and the influence of social interaction and language on the development of reasoning.Received Ph.D. from Harvard University. Research interests include moral development, altruism, and self-deception.     

La Vía Campesina: the birth and evolution of a transnational social movement

The origin and evolution of the transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina is analysed through five evolutionary stages. In the 1980s the withdrawal of the state from rural areas simultaneously weakened corporativist and clientelist control over rural organisations, even as conditions worsened in the countryside. This gave rise to a new generation of more autonomous peasant organisations, who saw the origins of their similar problems as largely coming from beyond the national borders of weakened nation-states. A transnational social movement defending peasant life, La Vía Campesina emerged out of these autonomous organisations, first in Latin America, and then at a global scale, during the 1980s and early 1990s (phase 1). Subsequent stages saw leaders of peasant organisations take their place at the table in international debates (1992–1999, phase 2), muscling aside other actors who sought to speak on their behalf; take on a leadership role in global struggles (2000–2003, phase 3); and engage in internal strengthening (2004–2008, phase 4). More recently (late 2008–present, phase 5) the movement has taken on gender issues more squarely and defined itself more clearly in opposition to transnational corporations. Particular emphasis is given to La Vía Campesina's fight to gain legitimacy for the food sovereignty paradigm, to its internal structure, and to the ways in which the (re)construction of a shared peasant identity is a key glue that holds the struggle together despite widely different internal cultures, creating a true peasant internationalism.     

entry and exit—a poem

In this article I examine the friction between xenophobic discourses on migration and the crisis caused by the politics of austerity in Greece. On the one hand, an ‘excessive’ influx of migration is managed through violent means by the state and the para-state; on the other, a ‘scarcity’ of domestic resources is blamed for a ‘rise’ in racist attitudes, and the political ascent of a fascist movement-cum-parliamentary party, Χρυσ? Αυγ? (Golden Dawn). ‘Crisis’ is said to give rise to ‘austerity’—and hostility. Inverting the inverted causal relationship between crisis, austerity and hostility, I problematise representations of hostility towards migrants that construct racism as a consequence of economic conditions or even as the antidote to the ‘bitter pill’ Greeks have been forced to swallow. I examine how racialised and gendered violence secures the politics of austerity in Greece focusing on three eruptions of violence (the feminicidal acid attack on Konstantina Kouneva, the murder of Shehzad Luqman and the drowning of eleven refugees near the island of Farmakonisi). I draw concrete connections between the politics of austerity and what, drawing on Sara Ahmed, might be termed an ‘affective economy of hostility’ that articulates racialised and gendered modes of belonging and estrangement. Some bodies are rendered vulnerable and precarious, while others assert an entitled relation to national space while being economically disentitled by austerity measures.     

‘Nationalising Hundreds and Thousands of Women’: a domestic response to a national problem

The wartime evacuee has become a symbol of the home front in World War Two. However, behind the iconic image lie more complex histories. The government evacuation scheme both encouraged and enforced many homeowners to share their private domestic space with strangers. The preparation, organisation and monitoring of this scheme led to unparalleled public interference into the private space of the home. The enforced domestic intimacy this led to resulted in the voluntary and governmental agencies becoming increasingly entangled in a complex, shifting understanding of ideas of the family, domestic labour, motherhood and the home during wartime.     

Exit from agriculture: a step forward or a step backward for the rural poor?

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development recommends that rural smallholders unable to compete in higher value production should exit agriculture. For the old and new landless, the way forward is wage labour in agriculture, in rural off farm work, or in urban areas. Disjunctively, the Report also proposes ‘farm-financed social welfare’ as a safety net when urban workers are ejected back to countryside at times of ‘urban shock’. My essay contrasts the Report's narrative about felicitous trajectories away from and back to the farm with the historical and contemporary experience of Asia's rural poor.     

In the pursuit of a gender-equal society: do Japanese EFL textbooks play a role?

‘Womenomics’, a signature programme promoted by the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, aims to boost the country’s economy by attracting women, an under-utilized resource, to join the workforce. To achieve this aim, the Japanese Government has been promoting a gender-equal society in various areas, including education. This paper seeks to investigate whether the government’s endeavour to promote a gender-equal society is reflected in contemporary Japanese EFL textbooks. Three recently published popular textbooks were examined. The findings revealed evidence of the authors’ gender awareness, including common use of gender-neutral vocabulary and a neutral term of address, Ms, for women. Two textbooks also displayed a balanced distribution of male and female speakers and their amount of talk. However, underrepresentation of women and their achievements is still prevalent in contemporary Japanese textbooks. Other observations include the portrayal of men in a wider range of social roles than women, and the depiction of men using material and cognitive processes and women using relational processes, suggesting that men are more physically and cognitively active than women. A gender dichotomy was also noted in mixed-sex dialogues, with a tendency for men to provide information and for women to seek information.     

Does Feminist History have a future?

Abstract

Contemporary shifts in scholarship and institutional agendas, I argue, have created new sets of challenges for feminist history. While these do not undermine the paradigms of this scholarly endeavour, there has been an inevitable shift in how feminist history is now written, conceptualised and undertaken. A hallmark of dynamic and innovative scholarship is a capacity to evolve and respond to intellectual challenges and developments. There is much to be positive about in the future, as I believe feminist history at its best has not remained a passive or static body of knowledge, but continues to be reformulated and reconceptualised, but with this dynamism comes uncertainties which institutional change can bring. While I do not believe these are systemic enough to pose a challenge to the enterprise, I suggest they do create cause for wider discussion, especially about the place of the humanities more generally in the corporate university of the twenty-first century.     

Women's Studies: Between a Rock and a Hard Place or Just Another Cell in the Beehive?

The article traces the history of Women's Studies from its beginnings as the ‘intellectual arm of the women's movement’. It argues that the complex story of Women's Studies has been marked by both ambiguity and uncertainty as well as sustained political commitment in the face of both institutional opposition and feminist ambivalence about Women's Studies as a field of scholarship. The development of Women's Studies occurs through crucial shifts in the theoretical paradigms of feminism and the political preoccupations of the women's movement. These shifts have both deconstructed the founding premises of feminist theory and generated a greater depth to feminist thinking and research. These challenges to Women's Studies have paralleled a different set of problems arising from the increasingly market-oriented direction pursued throughout the tertiary education sector. In spite of these difficulties Women's Studies continues to survive and constitutes an important and contested site of contemporary feminist thought.     

is there really a second shift,and if so,who does it? a time-diary investigation

This paper draws on data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) (over 4,000 randomly selected households) to tease out the dimensions of the ‘second shift’. Predictions that as women entered the paid workforce men would contribute more to household labour have largely failed to eventuate. This underpins the view that women are working a second shift because they are shouldering a dual burden of paid and unpaid work. However, time use research seems to show that when both paid and unpaid work is counted, male and female workloads are in total very similar. This has led to suggestions that a literal second shift is a myth; that it exists in the sense that women do more domestic work than men, but not in the sense that they work longer hours in total. Using a more accurate and telling measure of workload than previous research (paid and unpaid labour including multitasked activities), this paper explores the second shift and how it relates to family configuration, ethnicity and indicators of class and socioeconomic standing. It finds a clear disparity between the total workloads of mothers and fathers, much of which consists of simultaneous (secondary) activity, and some demographic differences in female (but not male) total workloads. It concludes that the view that the second shift is a myth is only sustainable by averaging social groups very broadly and by excluding multitasking from the measurement of total work activity.     

A pen that ‘looks like a CEO in a business suit’: gendering the fountain pen

This article investigates the gendering of the fountain pen as a product category mainly used in the office environment. It draws on hobbyists’ accounts and evaluations of fountain pen use from online forums. The accounts suggest that hobbyists perceive the fountain pen market to take executive men as its authentic user group, whereas pens that target women often reflect stereotypical femininities. At the office, this gendering process impacts users’ everyday experiences especially with reference to the managerial norms that govern the use of suits and accessories, since the fountain pen is considered by its users as part of an array of men’s status objects. The article contributes to the literature on the gendering of artifacts by describing a hegemonic manner in which artifacts are gendered, that is, as a range of products that target diverse masculinities and femininities in contradistinction to a single, masculine product type.     

YouTube: a new space for birth?

Birth, in many societies, is considered to be a private affair. Although health and medical professionals usually assist, the only other people who share the birth process with mothers are their nearest and dearest. With the rise of information communication technologies, however, birth is no longer an exclusively private event. Some women are now sharing their birthing experiences with millions of viewers who are part of the online video ‘community’ YouTube Broadcast Yourself. Searching the word ‘birth’ on YouTube results in close to one million ‘hits’. This article is based on a small-scale, qualitative research project, which involved viewing and making notes on several hundred online videos of birth on YouTube and the accompanying posts and commentaries about the videos. These data were analysed through a feminist, poststructuralist and geographical lens. Throughout the article the term ‘cyber/space’ is used to highlight the mutually constituted nature of ‘real’ and virtual spaces. The article concludes that although YouTube has the potential to open up new windows on birth, this potential is not yet being realized. YouTube does not overcome or render insignificant material expressions of power, instead it typically privileges US experiences of birth, reiterates discourses of ‘good’ mothering and censors particular (mainly vaginal) representations of birth.     

LIP: a workers’ community facing globalization

The aim of this article is to show how at the beginning of the 1970s a community of workers in Besançon in France reacted to globalization. It deals with the culture of the working class in a French province, the level of organization of the community and how it reacted when ‘its’ factory was taken over by a multinational company. In seeking to understand this transformation and how the workers perceived it, it is crucial to investigate the changing role of the state. All these aspects will be developed in the sections below with the aim of better understanding the meaning of the strategy of workers’ resistance in the face of a change that affected the community, the sector of production, the region and, ultimately, the working class within the Western societies.     

Is there a global environmental justice movement?

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.     

As unconscious and gay as a trout in a stream?: turning the trope of the Australian Girl

The instability of colonial representational economies, identities and tropes is the subject of analysis in this paper. I take as my starting point the anxieties that were generated during the late 19th century in relation to what I nominate the fictitiousness of settler subjects in colonial Australia. In order to examine these historical concerns and their explicitly gendered representations, I consider in detail one text, Rosa Campbell Praed's Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902). This text was published in 1902 and was one of a number of romance novels this author produced for readerships in both colonial Australia and England. This adventure romance features the trope of the Australian Girl and also engages in varying degrees with discourses of colonial ethnography that, to my knowledge, have not been examined in relation to the ideological production and effects of this figure.     

‘Where There’s a Will There’s a Woman’: Exploring the Gendered Nature of Will-Making

This paper explores the gendered nature of the formal will-making process. Longer female life expectancy means that women often make the final decision regarding the disposal of relational assets. Inheritance is thus identified as a rare opportunity for them to enjoy power and control over family wealth. There are, however, questions as to whether that enjoyment may be inhibited by the presence of men. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with professional legal practitioners this paper discusses how, when couples seek will-making advice together, that process is largely dominated and driven by women. It argues that this situation is primarily attributable to a combination of the multi-faceted nature of will-making and, crucially, women’s position and role within the family. Having identified the possibilities available to women to exercise power and authority over men in this context, the paper concludes with a brief consideration of the potential implications for both practitioners and policy-makers.     

Rethinking ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’

One of the most significant shifts in current thinking on war and gender is the recognition that rape in wartime is not a simple by-product of war, but often a planned and targeted policy. For many feminists ‘rape as a weapon of war’ provides a way to articulate the systematic, pervasive, and orchestrated nature of wartime sexual violence that marks it as integral rather than incidental to war. This recognition of rape as a weapon of war has taken on legal significance at the Rwandan and Yugoslav Tribunals where rape has been prosecuted as a crime against humanity and genocide. In this paper, I examine how the Rwanda Tribunal’s record of judgments conceives of rape enacted as an instrument of the genocide. I consider in particular how the Tribunal’s conception of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ shapes what can be known about sexual violence and gender in the Rwandan genocide and what cannot, the categories of victims legally recognised and those that are not, and the questions pursued, and those foreclosed, about the patterns of violence before and during the genocide.