Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March

Although the study of local cultures has become established in American sociology, it often ignores the contested nature of how culture emerges and is negotiated within the context of small groups. To this end, we address the concept of infighting, a subtype of conflict, as it operates within a small group framework. Building on an ethnographic study of the Chicago Dyke March, we demonstrate that infighting highlights competing ideologies that may remain implicit in the absence of such conflict. Infighting treats divergent meaning systems as part of local contention between rival cliques and power centers. These ideological battles both reflect pre-existing differences between subgroups and serve to make explicit and public such differences, both in their background characteristics and in their interests. In the process infighting directs attention away from shared concerns and group building to questions of strategy, transforming the small group into an arena of ideological production and factional rivalry. Infighting recasts a group from a space of consensus to a contested political arena. We elaborate four analytic processes through which infighting connects to ideology and small group culture: infighting emphasizes the multivocality of meaning, cultural heterogeneity, an equilibrium of inclusion and group boundaries, and planning in light of ideologies of power.     

Corporate social responsibility: A challenge for the donor community

As corporate social Responsibility (CSR) increases in large corporate organisations, a genuine approach to sustainable development is often best achieved through the supply chain. This is directly applicable to North–South supply-chain interactions (private-sector organisations, NGOs, and donors). CSR has adopted techniques from their ‘development’ usage, yet a reverse flow is not observed back to the ‘development’ sector. This is unfortunate. Private-sector organisations and NGOs (especially the larger ones) are well placed to take advantage of the increase in CSR relating to developing countries. More importantly, donors of all types would have increased influence if they took up CSR principles. Opportunity costs are not high and the advocacy potential is huge. This paper reviews CSR techniques and argues for donors to accept the challenge of incorporating them into their operations to influence more efficiently the process they seek to change.     

Grey intelligence

This contribution attempts to introduce the concept of ‘grey intelligence’ to denote the increasingly mixed and complex nature of intelligence gathering operations, services and markets. ‘Grey’ here refers to the blurred boundaries between public and private spheres, and to the increasing importance of private, ‘informal’ initiatives and provisions in the gathering, circulation and distribution of intelligence. Situating the phenomenon against the backdrop of what the author has earlier called ‘grey policing,’ the paper explores a number of aspects pertaining to grey intelligence.     

Race and Law in Fortress Europe

The universality of human rights is undermined by the principle of territorial supremacy. This allows member states of the EU to discriminate against those who are not citizens of the Union. Moreover, the European Convention on Human Rights and the EC Race Directive are incapable of redressing collective racial or ethnic disadvantage because they do not provide for the enforcement of positive social, economic and cultural obligations. These limitations are assessed in the light of current political and legal developments, using as the main illustration the case of the European Roma. An analysis is provided of obligations to respect, to protect and to fulfil social rights, which could be used when challenging the actions of public authorities and securing access for individuals to public facilities and services. An inclusionary approach would emphasise that equality is central to human rights, and that 'outsiders' such as migrant workers and asylum-seekers have human rights.     

PROFESSIONAL INTERDEPENDENCE IN DIVORCE PRACTICES

Divorce mediation is one area of the new and growing field of interpersonal mediation. Differences and similarities between divorce mediation and divorce psychotherapy are discussed in this article, and a method for teamwork between the two professions is proposed. The authors take the approach that the separate but overlapping practices of mediation and psychotherapy can be interdependent and that specific benefits to divorcing clients can result when divorce mediation and divorce psychotherapy are practiced collaboratively.