Adaptive strategies of smaller foreign investors in the Russian agricultural sector: identity,narrative and performance

This paper utilises a qualitative narrative analysis approach to examine smaller foreign investors operating within the Russian agricultural sector as private farmers: the foreign versions of the krestyansko-fermerskiye khoziaistva (peasant farms) that were the early focus of agrarian reform. With difficulty experienced by foreign investment in Russian agriculture, and with the Putin administration shifting its focus to larger scale agriculture, interest lies in the fate of these smaller foreign investors, set in the broader question of: ‘Is there really a future for smaller foreign investors in Russia?’ The investors were aligned along a performance and narrative spectrum, and the construction of their identities – guided by their adaptive processes on the ‘Turnerian’ frontier – were found to shape their business conduct, and interactions with labour forces and regional authorities. Negative prejudgment of the labour force existed amongst the investors – with associated negative notions of trust, inefficiency, laziness, morality, and sexual deviancy – and they were involved in explicit or ambiguous forms of gift-gifting, drawing parallels to Soviet blat behaviour. This paper concludes that despite efforts to construct identity, the narratives of the investors betrayed themselves in certain aspects, with elements of ‘undoing’ in the identity process.     

Gender,money and professional identity: medical social work and the coming of the British National Health Service

The arrival of the British National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 heralded significant changes for all health workers, but the establishment of a ‘free’ health service was especially meaningful for the hospital almoners—or medical social workers, as they were starting to be known—who had previously been responsible for the assessment and collection of patient payments. It was on this basis they had gained a foothold in the hospital, capitalising on gendered assumptions of financial understanding and behaviour. Yet what might have caused an identity crisis was embraced. This was a dual strategy of both repositioning the profession in alignment with the planned NHS and of asserting an enhanced professional status by distancing themselves from the handling of payment. It was an episode in the history of this distinctly female profession that speaks to women’s historic relationship with money.     

De/valuing youth work: Revealing tensions in professional identity development while enhancing and applying mental health literacy

Thirteen preservice youth work students participated in learning experiences designed to enhance literacies in mental health. The aim of this grounded theory study was to explicate the process of mental health literacy enhancement and application to child and youth care practice. Sixty-two unique sources of data were used in analyses. Findings suggest that mental health literacies are intertwined with the process of developing a professional identity. In this article, the subcategory de/valuing youth work is explained and involves participants managing a confusing role, adopting a misfit stance, battling and building a seat at the interprofessional table, and valuing professional contributions. Implications for professional identity development, professionalization and mental health education are offered.     

Endless Sex: The Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Persistence of a Legal Category

This paper challenges a view of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 as involving an unequivocal shift from the concept of sex to the concept of gender in law’s understanding of the distinction between male and female. While the Act does move in the direction of gender, and ostensibly in an obvious way through abandoning surgical preconditions for legal recognition, it will be argued that the Act retains and deploys the concept of sex. Moreover, it will be argued that the concept of sex retained is not merely an anatomical understanding, but sex in a biological sense. In this respect the Gender Recognition Act can be viewed as embodying a tension between gender and sex. Further, it is contended that this tension is explicable in terms of irresolution of contrary legal desires to reproduce the gender order and to insulate marriage and heterosexuality from homosexuality in the moment of reform.     

The Role of Epistemic Cognition in Adolescent Identity Formation: Further Evidence

Following Boyes and Chandler (1992), it is investigated how adolescents’ epistemic understanding relates to the process of identity formation. In a cross-sectional as well as longitudinal study, identity status scores of diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium and identity achievement as assessed by the Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status were analyzed as a function of adolescents’ epistemic stance, while simultaneously taking into account individual differences in identity processing styles. The cross-sectional sample was composed of 200 German adolescents from Grades 7, 9, 11, and 13 (mean age: 16.2 years, SD = 2.41). The longitudinal study consisted of 134 participants (mean age at retest: 16.5 years, SD = 1.7) and covered a time interval of 18 months. Findings confirmed the view that the development of epistemic cognition contributes to adolescent identity formation. Specifically, the development of a multiplistic epistemic stance predicted higher moratorium scores, whereas the more advanced evaluativist epistemic position contributed to identity achievement over time. These effects were not due to individual differences in identity processing style.     

Queer,young, and homeless: A review of the literature

Queer (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, questioning, two-spirited) youth are greatly overrepresented in the homeless youth population. The present review critically analyzes the literature on queer youth homelessness, with a particular focus on (a) methodological issues; (b) entries into homelessness; (c) programming needs; (d) targeted programming; and (e) exits out of homelessness. Results from this review demonstrate that homeless queer youth are a unique population who require specialized services, implemented by sensitive and knowledgeable staff. Recommendations focus on practical implications, policy implications, and ideas for future research.     

Dancing across difference: Experience and identity in the classroom

This article uses Liquid Sky to consider the possibilities of feminist reorientations outside of formal and political orthodoxies and suggests that such disengagements from the dominant are alienated from the utopian rather than re-imagined as transgressive modes of utopian resistance. These disengagements are theorized as a postpunk feminist dystopia: that is, a de-emancipatory system of gendered and aesthetic practices that spatio-sonically shapes queer female sexuality as extrinsic to social and sexual ideals. This dystopia specifically frames the lesbian subject as a bodily terrain of self-estrangement, and names the film's network of alienated corporeal, subcultural, and sonic space. Feminist dystopia ultimately describes female empowerment's precarious position in a sexual and sonic landscape of non-normativity and offers a way to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily correspond to liberation.     

Linkages of oil and politics: oil strikes and dual power in the Iranian revolution

ABSTRACT

Looking at the oil strikes during the Iranian revolution (1978–79), this article challenges dominant narratives of the relationship between oil and politics and the processes that shaped the outcome of the revolution. The main arguments of the article are developed in a critical dialogue with Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy. Firstly, the article argues that the scale of the oil strikes and their central role in the creation of organs of revolutionary power call into question the generalization about the material characteristics of oil that supposedly prevented mobilization. Secondly, the article argues that the fact that oil workers were able to organize mass strikes, but failed to create an independent organization, calls for an explanatory approach that combines material factors with the role of consciousness, ideology and organization. This leads to a rereading of the Iranian revolution that highlights the essential role of the oil strikes in the emergence of dual power in early 1979, and the contingency of their outcome.     

The Liquefaction of Desire: Music,Water and Femininity in Victorian Aestheticism

This article reconsiders Victorian images of mermaids and sirens through a detailed examination of two images: Frederic Leighton's Lieder ohne Worte (1861, oil on canvas, Tate Britain) and Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea (1886, oil on canvas, private collection). It demonstrates that the themes of water, music and femininity were entwined in the Victorian imagination, by setting these two paintings within the context of Victorian artistic, literary and cultural production. It shows that musical images were prevalent in the emerging Aesthetic movement. Musical subjects freed artists and audiences from the conventions of narrative interpretation, and allowed them instead to concentrate on exploring mood and colour.

Pictures of mermaids add a further twist to the Aesthetic preoccupation with music. This article reveals that mermaids made explicit the underlying connection between musical performance and sensuality. It also suggests that the idiosyncratic depiction of the mermaid by Burne-Jones and the ambiguous sexuality of Leighton's figures could be read as symptomatic of changing conceptions of desire. It argues that these images embodied the shift from ardour to libido. In other words, love was no longer described as burning and fixed, but as fluid and shifting. This transformation in the way desire was theorised was most urgently presented in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). However, this article suggests that the same ideas were being made visible in Aesthetic art and writing from the mid-nineteenth century.     

The construction of a slave identity: an examination of the dual identity of indentured labourers across the Western Pacific

ABSTRACT

The examination of indentured labour in the Western Pacific has been reported as pure historiography, without the guidance of an explicit theoretical framework. It has concluded that indenture in this case does not meet its own definition of slavery. However, this analysis is highly dated in as much as it is narrowly institutionalist in perspective, relying on legalistic points of distinction, such as the existence of a labour contract. To challenge this established wisdom a new-institutionalist history is conjured from existing social an economic theory. This enables the topic to be brought into the business and organisation disciplines. The examination demonstrates the promotion of a dual identity, which cast native labourers as free labourers, while instantiating norms readily identifiable with slavery. These norms served to encourage low-status natives into acceptance of the disciplines of the plantation and other businesses as part of the natural order, but proved unsustainable over the longer term as a broader range of life choices emerged.     

Youth Work in Gay Straight Alliances: Curriculum,Pedagogy, and Activist Development

Critical pedagogy empowers Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) advisers facilitate reflective, activist-oriented learning. Its use in school clubs has broad implications for both teachers and youth workers. Informed by critical multiculturalism, this study draws on ethnographic fieldwork from one school year and in-depth interviews with GSA participants. Data reveal that the GSA advisor's understanding of critical pedagogy is characterized by expanding students’ knowledge, facilitating students’ activism, and encouraging students’ reflection on significant interactions with peers and family. The author concludes these pedagogical practices help create long-term GSAs, where engaged student learning and activism promote a “third space” in youth development work.     

Acting out of character: Window on the identity crisis

An autobiographical account of acting out of character at a life turning point is presented as a window on a young person's identity crisis. Analysis of that account reveals (1) that the play of the tentative identities reflects the concurrent crisis in the character of that person's society, (2) that the story the person now has to tell sets forth the range of the psychosocial issues active in his life, (3) that the mysteries generated identify for the person the specific issues at crisis, (4) that the novelty of the event itself catalyzes called for changes, and (5) that the metaphor of the out of character actions serves to preview the ultimate resolution.Received M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, in 1964, and psychiatry training at Yale. Interests lie in the area of psychotherapy with disturbed youth, careers of young people who become psychiatric aides in mental hospitals, and group homes for adolescents.