Langauge and Violence: Analysis of Four Discursive Operations

The Interactional and Discursive View of Violence and Resistance is a framework for critical analysis and research, prevention and intervention that takes into account the conditions that enable personalized violence, the actions of perpetrators and victims, and the language used in representing those actions. Using this analytic framework, we analyzed five accounts of personalized violence, one each from a perpetrator, a psychiatrist, a judge, a government minister, and a therapist. Our results demonstrate the scope and the ubiquity with which diverse accounts locally accomplish four-discursive-operations; namely, the concealing of violence, obfuscating of perpetrators’ responsibility, concealing of victims’ resistance, and blaming and pathologizing of victims. We examine the specific linguistic devices that combine to accomplish the four-discursive-operations in each case. These data suggest that the problem of violence is inextricably linked to the problem of representation.

Discontinuity and Disaster: Gaps and the Negotiation of Culpability in Medication Delivery

This paper shows how discontinuities in the process of drug delivery enable but also underdetermine the isolation of a culprit in adverse medication events. A case example illustrates how we are forced to abandon conceptualizations of blame that assume a dichotomy (either culpable or not), and shift instead to a more nuanced version that estimates the degree to which an actor desired, generated, or could have foreseen the harmful outcome, and the extent to which constraints external to the actor altered the event. The paper concludes that meaningful safety interventions in a system as diverse, socially embedded and complex as health care delivery cannot just build on "good science" (e.g., good methods) to generate "root" causes. Rather, they need to somehow be sensitive to how and which narratives of success and failure are created, as these constrain which countermeasures are likely to be encouraged, funded, and accepted.     

Economic conditions and voting in Japanese house elections

Based on a Downsian perspective of voting behavior, this study assesses the extent to which short-term regional economic conditions influenced the electoral district vote for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the 1983 and 1986 elections to the House of Representatives. Unlike traditional scholarly interpretations, which stress the unique and nonindividualistic determinants of Japanese voting, our regression estimates indicate that economic voting in Japan resembles that identified in studies of other political systems, where unemployment has been shown to be an important predictor of the vote, which income is not. The findings fit with more recent evidence that Japanese political behavior is genuinely susceptible to comparative analysis, and point to the need for a revised understanding of Japanese electoral behavior.