Maternal employment and teenage childbearing: Evidence from the PSID

Over the last 30 years, the tenet of promoting self‐sufficiency through work has become one of the primary objectives of many social welfare policies in the United States. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the author asks if a mother's work hours influence her daughter's teenage fertility. The findings suggest a negative relationship, with the largest effects for the daughters of mothers who work more than 1,000 hours per year. Results among AFDC recipients suggest that an increase in a mother's work hours from zero to 20 hours per week reduces her daughter's probability of a teen birth by 33 percent. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

On discourse ∗

This article attempts to contribute to the theorisation of the relations between subjectivity and language through an investigation of the use of the term ‘discourse’ in the work of two linguists: Emile Benveniste and Zellig Harris. The positive aspects of Benveniste's emphasis on intersubjectivity are considered as well as the problems raised by the failure to grasp the necessary division of the subject in language. Harris's work provides formal procedures which analyse discourse independently of subjective interpretation but without a theory of institutions or ideology the constitution of the corpus to be analysed finds no justification outside a banal empiricism. The possibilities and problems of Michel Pecheux's attempt to elaborate Harris's work in relation to Althusser's theory of ideology occupies the final section of the article.     

Durkheim and the Reflexive Condition of Modernity

Abstract

In this essay, Durkheim's work is approached from a double vantage point. One vantage point looks at Durkheim's work with a post-classical attitude that inter sects the ontological recasting of the social in the work of Castoriadis. It is in the context of social opening that will concentrate on Durkheim's work as it presents a model of reflexivity that concentrates on the historical development of the modern period. Durkheim's model of reflexivity also opens onto the other vantage point of political modernity, which is viewed as a particular constellation of the circulation of power, especially in nation-states, open forms of reflexivity, and democracy, in contrast to another political modernity that revolves around closed socially reflexive forms of totalitarianism and terrorism. Durkheim's work can be a fruitful point of departure for an analysis of political modernity because his theorisation occurs in a way that opens onto the historical development of its mode of reflexivity.     

Introduction to Kirchheimer

Mainly through examining an essay by Iris Marion Young on policy and treatment for pregnant drug users, I compare the feminist ethic of care with the ethics of Michel Foucault, which, I argue, are founded upon the value of freedom. I find several contradictions in Young's work. She criticizes universalization, but does not avoid it herself; she espouses the value of freedom, yet wants the other to conform to her own values. I argue that the problem lies in Young's liberal-humanist understanding of freedom and its relation to ethics. Foucault's understanding of freedom is a sounder base for an ethics, and this provides needed support for the concept of caring. It also yields new perspectives on social problems such as drugs.     

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

Abstract

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’ and ‘concepts’—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically     

Disciplinary projects and carceral spread: Foucauldian theory and Chinese practice

This paper has a dual object: Fist, utilizing Foucault;s definiation of ‘disciplinary power’, the paper demon-strates the disciplinary nature of China's Reform through labour (laogai) system. It is suggested that laogai is an extension, deepening and modification of certain nineteeenth-century Western utilitarian penal themes designed to ‘reform the criminal mind’ and produce 'obedient subjects'. Second, having established the disciplinary nature of the laogai project, the paper then goes on to examine the (neo-Foucauldian) 'disciplinary dispersal thesis'. This thesis suggestes a gradual spread of carceral technologies which led to the formation of a disciplinary society. this paper suggests that there are a number of theoretical problems in this thesis, not the least of which is its rather ambiguous relationship to the work of Foucault.     

A Political Science of Punishment: Francis Lieber and the Discipline of American Prisons

This article examines the history of political science in relation to the history of the prison. It considers how theories of the state in political science have assumed that proper states should punish with prisons, and traces these ideas to the work of Francis Lieber, the first academic political scientist in the USA. Because his ideas about prison reform were central to his conceptualization of the discipline as a science of punishment, his theory of the state is an understudied part of the history of mass incarceration. Lieber argued that the state had a moral duty to punish its citizens with the prison, and an obligation to manage the risks of democracy through the prison's principles of scientific certainty, less eligibility, and disciplinary solitude. By examining the life and work of Francis Lieber, this article offers new ways of thinking about political science's past, and its status as part of the history of the American prison.     

Postcolonial Interventions: Gayatri Spivak,Three Wise Men and the Native Informant

Abstract

This article responds to Terry Eagleton's claim that Spivak's latest book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, works against the intent of postcolonial criticism. Reading the work as a search for a just representational strategy, we explore the implications of Spivak's engagement with philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and Marx. As a disciplinary machine, philosophy produces Western subjects who are engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. Working through this production of the double location of the ‘other’ we suggest that systematic thought is inhabited by an absence that is present within, a disturbing otherness that ultimately questions authority and stability, and opens up the question of politics and representation. Drawing Spivak into the representational problematic opened up by Lyotard, we suggest that a responsible postcolonial intervention can be performed in the difficult exergue between representability and unrepresentability. In this account, representation is open to invention, to finding new idioms for articulating otherness.     

The Queer Jew: Gender,Sexuality and Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Antisemitism

In an attempt to understand the mechanisms that enable the perpetuation of racism, Judaken examines how antisemitic stereotypes can be reiterated in the discourse of those individuals most committed to the eradication of antisemitism. He argues that typologies - mythic images of collective identity - depend upon an associative logic. These associations are engendered in the construction of the Self (both individual and collective), by demarcating it-self from the Other(s), generally through tropes of gender, pathology and race. Judaken focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew,a text which Sartre called 'a declaration of war against antisemitic motifs', and argues that this unintended effect is the result of how Sartre conceptualizes both consciousness and the relation between the Self and Other in Being and Nothingness. This work of existential phenomenology, that sought radically to critique the western metaphysical tradition, nevertheless reinscribes dominant assumptions within western culture about gender and sexuality. Judaken shows how Sartre's re-citation of these assumptions fundamentally determines how he conceives of the relation between the antisemite and 'the Jew'. He concludes, however, by suggesting that imminent to Sartre's own position, there is an-other way of conceiving of the relation between Self and Other that might offer hope beyond the impasses of the western tradition's failures in embracing difference, singularity and particularity.     

Work redesign in development perspective: An empirical study of multitasking among civil servants in Malawi

Civil servants in many developing countries are increasingly faced with multitask situations at work to improve the efficiency of public sectors. Although multitasking might boost employee productivity, its potentially negative impact on other areas of employees’ lives has been ignored. Drawing upon the conservation of resources theory, our research aims to investigate whether, how, and when multitasking at work decreases the subjective well-being of employees in the public sector. Using a two-wave survey of 164 civil servants in Malawi, our findings showed that multitasking at work was positively related to employees’ negative affect and negatively related to their satisfaction with life and positive affect through emotional exhaustion. Moreover, the study found that polychronicity, which refers to one's preference to handle more than one task at the same time, moderated the relationship between multitasking and emotional exhaustion, such that the association described above was weaker when an employee's polychronicity was higher. Finally, the indirect impact of multitasking on positive affect through emotional exhaustion was also moderated by polychronicity. These findings provide some theoretical and managerial implications for public sector in developing countries on how to focus on employee well-being while using multitasking work design.     

Theodor Adorno,Alterglobalization, and Non-identity Politics

While the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School has become an interesting player in recent theoretical attempts to understand the problems of, and potential solutions to, capitalist regimes of globalization, it has been generally limited to the work of Jürgen Habermas and his followers. As seen in the recent work of David Held and Nancy Fraser, Habermas's notion of the ideal of the public sphere and his conception of deliberative democracy have provided tantalizing tools for rethinking the importance of global civil institutions and spaces in furthering, to draw upon terms from Fraser's work, both recognition and redistribution on a global level. What has been less relevant in this resuscitation of Critical Theory in things global has been the work of the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists. In particular, the importance that Theodor Adorno's theory may have in articulating and characterizing the character of alterglobalization movements is explored. Adorno's notion of negative dialectics is first looked to in order to uncover a conception of radical politics, and then the recent attempt by John Holloway to bring in Adorno for the global anti-capitalist movement is explored. It is argued that while Holloway draws upon relevant and important aspects of Adorno's thinking, he does so by reinforcing some of the more problematic elements in Adorno's theory. Finally, Ernesto Laclau's characterization of political struggle is brought in to fully flesh out a non-identity politics implied in Adorno's work.     

Lacan et la philosophie

This review article examines certain of the assumptions that inform Juranville's philosophical reading of Lacan and demonstrates that, whilst his foregrounding of phenomenology is an important contribution to Lacanian studies in that it suggests that Lacan's reference to linguistics may have been overstated and that it is more productive to read his work as a more general reflection on language and signification, it depends ultimately upon the unfounded assumption that Lacan's discourse is a system to be read purely in terms of its self-development or synchrony. It is further argued that Lacan's relationship with philosophy is more ambiguous than the author suggests and that Juranville's vision of the philosophical field requires a certain problematization     

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine two turns towards the idea of the creative imagination in contemporary critical theory in the works of Axel Honneth and Cornelius Castoriadis. Honneth's work subsumes the idea of the creative imagination under the paradigm of mutual recognition. Castoriadis constructs the idea of the creative imagination from an ontological perspective. However, Castoriadis' idea of the primary autism of the creative imagination can be thrown into relief by Hegel's Jena Lectures. Hegel's and Castoriadis' work opens onto a subjectivity in tension, that is, a subjectivity that is forged out of a combination of subjective interiority, as well as the patterns of interaction that are multidimensional in their scope and create social spaces that force the subject beyond an initial closure.     

All Male Panels? Representation and Democratic Legitimacy

What does women's presence in political decision‐making bodies signal to citizens? Do these signals differ based on the body's policy decisions? And do women and men respond to women's presence similarly? Though scholars have demonstrated the substantive and symbolic benefits of women's representation, little work has examined how women's presence affects citizens' perceptions of democratic legitimacy. We test the relationship between representation and legitimacy beliefs through survey experiments on a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens. First, we find that women's equal presence legitimizes decisions that go against women's interests. We show suggestive evidence that this effect is particularly pronounced among men, who tend to hold less certain views on women's rights. Second, across decision outcomes and issue areas, women's equal presence legitimizes decision‐making processes and confers institutional trust and acquiescence. These findings add new theoretical insights into how, when, and for whom inclusive representation increases perceptions of democratic legitimacy.     

How do coalition signals shape voting behavior? Revealing the mediating role of coalition expectations

Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems.     

Kurdish migrant mothers in London enacting citizenship

The article explores the mothering work of a group of Kurdish women in London as enactments of citizenship. Rather than focusing on their integration, it foregrounds the migrant mothers' ability to disrupt hegemonic citizenship narratives and bring into being new political subjects. They co-construct diasporic citizenship, through their mothering work, producing their children's cultural identifications as both British and Kurdish. These identifications are contingent, involving intra-ethnic contestations of legitimate Kurdish culture. Kurdish migrant mothers' cultural work is not simply about making nation state citizens. By giving meaning to cultural continuity and change, the mothers reference multiple levels of belonging (local, national and diasporic) which challenge state boundaries. The article shows that although mothers play a key role in constructing their children's cultural identities and their articulation in ethnic and national terms, they also contest the meaning of ethnic minority cultural practices and group boundaries, potentially disrupting hegemonic narratives of good citizenship as ethno-national.     

Policy Legacies,Visa Reform and the Resilience of Immigration Politics

Comparative scholarship tacitly assumes immigration politics to be relatively rigid. A state's immigration policy legacy is said to institutionalise policy preferences, thereby making it difficult to implement lasting reforms that are inconsistent with that legacy. This presents difficulties for states with restrictionist legacies wanting to implement liberal reforms in response to the emergence of labour shortages or demographic problems. The supposed rigidity of immigration politics is scrutinised in this article through a systematic process analysis of developments in the United Kingdom over the past decade, where the Blair government confounded the UK's characterisation as a ‘reluctant immigration state’ to implement various liberal work visa reforms. The uncoordinated nature of policymaking and implementation, and the limited involvement of state and societal institutions in the reform process, reflect the UK's historical experience with restrictionist policies, and help to explain the subsequent reintroduction of strict visa controls. The case demonstrates that policy legacies indeed play a significant role in defining the character of the policymaking institutions that shape a state's immigration politics.     

A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a philosopher against racism

ABSTRACT

Bernasconi's essay locates Anténor Firmin's De l’égalité des races humaines (1885) in the context of the discussions of the science of race at the time, and argues that when seen in that light the book should be considered a work of philosophy as well as a contribution to the science of its day. Particular attention is given to the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis, the impact of Charles Darwin on the discussion of the human races, particularly through the work of Clémence Royer, and the role of positivism within anthropology. Although Firmin addressed the contributions of Charles Darwin and Arthur de Gobineau to the understanding of race, they were not his main focus, which was to expose the fallacies employed by the advocates of racial inequality. Firmin's reliance on the Comtean doctrine of progress makes it impossible for us to embrace his overall theory today without considerable reservations. Nevertheless, the ease with which he exposed the prejudices of many of the leading scientists of his day provides an invaluable challenge to all those who want to excuse their failure to promote racial equality on the grounds that they were simply ‘children of their time’.     

Are they really so different? Climate change rule development in the USA and UK

Climate change is an increasingly complex and global environmental issue. As a result, scholars have begun to compare the efforts of specific countries such as the UK and the USA in dealing with climate change. However, missing within this comparative literature is a discussion of the important role that administrative agencies play in implementing climate change policy through rulemaking. More specifically, it is unclear how administrative processes may impact or explain variations in the policy implemented within a given country. In fact, it has been over 25 years since Vogel's work compared the regulatory processes of the USA and UK. As a result, this paper's interviews with agency rule writers in both countries provide an updated comparison of their rulemaking processes, which is essential to understanding why countries may vary in the climate change policy they implement. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.