The sociology of professions has come full circle, leaving behind Parsons, his critics, and two generations of received wisdom. David Sciulli demonstrates compellingly that the sociology of ...professions advances the comparative study of civil society, democracy and rule of law.
The Professionalisation of Women Writers in Eighteenth Century Britain is a full study of a group of women who were actively and ambitiously engaged in a range of innovative publications at the ...height of the eighteenth century. Using personal correspondence, records of contemporary reception, research into contemporary print culture and sociological models of professionalisation, Betty A. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period, focusing on those women who have been most obscured by literary history, including Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox.
In the 1930s, the French Third Republic banned naturalized citizens from careers in law and medicine for up to ten years after they had obtained French nationality. In 1940, the Vichy regime ...permanently expelled all lawyers and doctors born of foreign fathers and imposed a 2 percent quota on Jews in both professions. On the basis of extensive archival research, Julie Fette shows inExclusionsthat doctors and lawyers themselves, despite their claims to embody republican virtues, persuaded the French state to enact this exclusionary legislation. At the crossroads of knowledge and power, lawyers and doctors had long been dominant forces in French society: they ran hospitals and courts, doubled as university professors, held posts in parliament and government, and administered justice and public health for the nation. Their social and political influence was crucial in spreading xenophobic attitudes and rendering them more socially acceptable in France.
Fette traces the origins of this professional protectionism to the late nineteenth century, when the democratization of higher education sparked efforts by doctors and lawyers to close ranks against women and the lower classes in addition to foreigners. The legislatively imposed delays on the right to practice law and medicine remained in force until the 1970s, and only in 1997 did French lawyers and doctors formally recognize their complicity in the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime. Fette's book is a powerful contribution to the argument that French public opinion favored exclusionary measures in the last years of the Third Republic and during the Holocaust.
Women of Color in STEM Ballenger, Julia; Polnick, Barbara; Irby, Beverly
2017, 2016-11-21
eBook
Women of Color in STEM: Navigating the Workforce is an opportunity for making public the life stories of women of color who have persevered in STEM workplace settings. The authors used various ...critical theories to situate and make visible the lives of women of color in such disciplines and workplace contexts like mathematics, science, engineering, NASA, academia, government agencies, and others. They skillfully centered women and their experiences at the intersection of their identity dimensions of race, class, gender, and their respective discipline.While the disciplines and career contexts vary, the oppression, alienation, and social inequities were common realities for all. Despite the challenges, the women were resilient and persevered with tenacity, a strong sense of self as a person of color, and reliance on family, community, mentors, and spirituality. While we celebrated the successes, it is critical that organizational leaders, whether in education or other workplace settings, draw from narratives and counter?narratives of these women to improve the organizational climate where individuals can thrive, despite their racial, class and gender identity. This book will assist educational communities, professional communities, and families to understand their roles and responsibilities in increasing the number of women of color in STEM.
Ce numéro se propose d'analyser les enjeux de l'engagement des corps au travail. Pour autant, il ne s'agit pas de s'intéresser aux corps dans leur dimension de force physique ou d'habileté technique. ...En effet, à cette dimension instrumentale des corps dans le travail peut être couplée une dimension symbolique : le travail s'effectue sous le regard d'autrui, qu'il s'agisse de la hiérarchie, des pairs, des clients ou usagers, des concurrents, etc. Dès lors, le travail devient « mise en jeu » et « jeu du corps » (Berthelot, 1998), au sens où le corps envoie des signaux dans un espace de significations sociales. C'est cette dimension du corps que l'on peut appeler en suivant Jean-Michel Berthelot, la corporéité, que les textes réunis dans ce dossier étudient. Dans cette perspective, ils interrogent la façon dont les signes émanant du corps sont interprétés en termes de professionnalisme du travailleur, dans la mesure où ils permettent de comprendre comment les corps sont engagés dans la production de la figure du professionnel, en regardant à la fois les dimensions corporelles visées et les processus et dispositifs de normalisation et de construction mis en jeu. Dans cette perspective, le corps traduit et trahit le professionnel, comme il traduit et trahit un ensemble de dispositions sociales incorporées par lui et utilisées par la profession dans la construction de sa propre légitimité.
Critical spirituality is a way of naming a desire to work with what is meaningful in the context of enabling a socially just, diverse and inclusive society. Critical spirituality means seeing people ...holistically, seeking to understand where they are coming from and what matters to them at a fundamental level; the level that is part of the everyday but also transcends it. What is important in critical spirituality is to combine a postmodern valuing of individual experience of spirituality with all its diversity with a critical perspective that asserts the importance of living harmoniously and respectfully at an individual, family and community level. Human service professionals currently wrestle with the gradually increasing expectation to work with spirituality often without feeling capable of undertaking such practice. Some work with people experiencing major trauma or change such as palliative care or rehabilitation where people ask meaning of life questions to which they feel ill equipped to respond. Others work with individuals, families and communities experiencing conflict about spiritual issues. Increased migration and movement of refugees increases contact with people for whom spirituality is central. Such experiences raise a number of issues for existing professionals as well as students: what do we mean by spiritual? How does this relate to religion? How do we work with the spiritual in ways that recognise and value difference, without accepting abusive relationships? What are the limits to spiritual tolerance, if any? This book explores these issues and addresses the dilemmas and challenges experienced by professionals. It also provides a number of practical tools such as possible questions to ask to assess for spiritual issues; to see spirituality as part of a web of relationships.
Fiona Gardner is Head of Social Work and Social Policy, Fiona Gardner, La Trobe University, Australia
Contents: Introduction; Part I Understanding Spirituality: Spirituality: what is it?; Making connections between religion, spirituality and practice; Connecting current theory for professional practice to exploring spirituality; Using critical reflection to explore critical spirituality. Part II Spirituality and Practice: Critical spirituality: a model; Starting with your own spirituality; Processes for critically spiritual practice; Applying critical spirituality in different work settings. Part III Practitioners' Perspectives: Les McLennan; Kate; David Mitchell; Melissa Brickell; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as ...requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and power were analyzed in the sociology of professions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by using it to explain the recent precipitous rise in autism diagnoses. This article shows that autism remained a rare disorder until the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation created a new institutional matrix within which a new set of actors-the parents of children with autism in alliance with psychologists and therapists-were able to forge an alternative network of expertise. Adapted from the source document.
Blended learning, defined as the combination of traditional face-to-face learning and asynchronous or synchronous e-learning, has grown rapidly and is now widely used in education. Concerns about the ...effectiveness of blended learning have led to an increasing number of studies on this topic. However, there has yet to be a quantitative synthesis evaluating the effectiveness of blended learning on knowledge acquisition in health professions.
We aimed to assess the effectiveness of blended learning for health professional learners compared with no intervention and with nonblended learning. We also aimed to explore factors that could explain differences in learning effects across study designs, participants, country socioeconomic status, intervention durations, randomization, and quality score for each of these questions.
We conducted a search of citations in Medline, CINAHL, Science Direct, Ovid Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, and ERIC through September 2014. Studies in any language that compared blended learning with no intervention or nonblended learning among health professional learners and assessed knowledge acquisition were included. Two reviewers independently evaluated study quality and abstracted information including characteristics of learners and intervention (study design, exercises, interactivity, peer discussion, and outcome assessment).
We identified 56 eligible articles. Heterogeneity across studies was large (I(2) ≥93.3) in all analyses. For studies comparing knowledge gained from blended learning versus no intervention, the pooled effect size was 1.40 (95% CI 1.04-1.77; P<.001; n=20 interventions) with no significant publication bias, and exclusion of any single study did not change the overall result. For studies comparing blended learning with nonblended learning (pure e-learning or pure traditional face-to-face learning), the pooled effect size was 0.81 (95% CI 0.57-1.05; P<.001; n=56 interventions), and exclusion of any single study did not change the overall result. Although significant publication bias was found, the trim and fill method showed that the effect size changed to 0.26 (95% CI -0.01 to 0.54) after adjustment. In the subgroup analyses, pre-posttest study design, presence of exercises, and objective outcome assessment yielded larger effect sizes.
Blended learning appears to have a consistent positive effect in comparison with no intervention, and to be more effective than or at least as effective as nonblended instruction for knowledge acquisition in health professions. Due to the large heterogeneity, the conclusion should be treated with caution.
PDF
