In this paper, I examine relationships between public space, gay people's cruising and construction of gay subjectivity in People's Park, Guangzhou, China. In particular, I interrogate the complex ...dynamics between the performance of homosexual identity and the dominant heteronormative ideologies in China's cultural-political sphere. I articulate how public cruising can be mobilized as a space of alternative socio-spatial ordering and simultaneously a closeted space to experience and reassert hegemonic divides of public/private, normal/abnormal. This paper employs an analysis of self-disciplining and the production of docile bodies to examine how gay cruisers construct gayness as deviant identity and thus attempt to reconcile gay subjects with dominant norms and values. The production of self-disciplining subjects is centered on the discursive formulation that gay men in public need to act in self-regulated and "low-profile" ways. This paper intends to enrich our understanding of the intrinsically dialectical relationships between public space and sexual subjectivity in concrete time spaces.
The effectiveness of police disciplining and social work counseling in preventing offending of at-risk youth has been unclear. For elucidating the prevention regarding theft and fighting, this study ...analyzes 1702 retrospective event history cases from 297 at-risk youths identified in the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai. Herein, the event history refers to theft, fighting, police disciplining, and social work counseling happening in the youth's age of 11years through 18years. The analysis reveals that the interventions of police disciplining and social work counseling, both in the previous year, demonstrated significant negative effects on fighting and theft respectively. Furthermore, combination of the two interventions generated a significant negative interaction effect on theft. These findings exemplify elasticity theory by showing that the hard form of police disciplining and the soft form of social work counseling are complementary in preventing offending. The findings imply the worth of promoting the interventions selectively to prevent hard and soft offending such as fighting and stealing respectively.
•A survey of 297 at-risk youths in Shanghai generates 1702 annual cases for analysis.•Police disciplining in the preceding year reduced fighting but not theft significantly.•Social work counseling in the preceding year reduced theft but not fighting significantly.•Police disciplining and social work counseling jointly reduced theft significantly.•Findings are explicable with systems theory and its component of elasticity theory.
Using a Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) approach, this paper explores which organizational forms Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) may take. A critical question about form is the amount of ...vertical integration that an ACO may have, a topic central to TCE. We posit that contextual factors outside and inside an ACO will produce variable transaction costs (the non-production costs of care) such that the decision to integrate vertically will derive from a comparison of these external versus internal costs, assuming reasonably rational management abilities. External costs include those arising from environmental uncertainty and complexity, small numbers bargaining, asset specificity, frequency of exchanges, and information “impactedness.” Internal costs include those arising from human resource activities including hiring and staffing, training, evaluating (i.e., disciplining, appraising, or promoting), and otherwise administering programs. At the extreme, these different costs may produce either total vertical integration or little to no vertical integration with most ACOs falling in between. This essay demonstrates how TCE can be applied to the ACO organization form issue, explains TCE, considers ACO activity from the TCE perspective, and reflects on research directions that may inform TCE and facilitate ACO development.
Based on a 3-year ethnography on crime prevention of the police in Germany, this article analyses how the police incorporate youth in their de-escalation work preceding an annual demonstration on the ...1st of May. A multimodal conversation analysis of work meetings traces how membership categorisation and assumption of social responsibility change: over the course of several months the police turn initially reluctant youth who the police at the outset considered ‘troublemakers’ into their ‘helpers’. They build an alliance by working with youth centres, influential people from the neighbourhood and participants of the previous year’s project. Whereas the police are the driving force at the beginning of the project, on the day of the demonstration they remain in the background and merely supervise the youth. This sequential development is discussed as a precarious process of disciplining the youth, driving the formation of a neighbourhood community and encouraging political consensus in society.
This paper examines Plato’s views about the unity of argument and drama, and asks why Plato never made his views on this unity fully explicit. Taking the Gorgias as a case study it is argued that ...unity rests on the conception of refutative dialectic as justice and on the principle of self-consistency of thought and desire. As compared to the treatise, the dialogue form has the advantage of being able to defend these substantive views in action and thus to demonstrate the performative contradictions in the ideas of one’s opponents.
The growth of the black middle class in ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa has become the subject of scholarly and public interest. Applying elements of discourse analysis to interview and group ...discussion based data, this article provides a qualitative thematic exploration of two pressures that confront a group of black middle-class professionals residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first pressure is the experience of being black under the hegemonic white gaze and the second is the experience of the marshalling black gaze. The complexities of occupying the positions of being black and middle class and of living with the scrutiny of two gazes concurrently, is explored. The findings suggest that the white gaze persists in seeking to negatively mark and destabilise black professionals and profiting off covert and paradoxical mobilisations of race discourses as a means of bolstering whiteness. On the other hand, the black gaze serves to police the boundaries of what acceptable blackness is. Under this gaze, the professional, black middle class is perceived as having sold out to whiteness and abandoned given conceptions of blackness. The tensions arising out of navigating these dialectical disciplining gazes suggests that this group holds the tenuous position of being corralled from the ‘outside’ and ‘inside.’ The research, however, reveals the complex ways in which racialisation continues to shape black lives alongside the less rigid identity possibilities for blackness that move beyond essentialised identity performances.
This article explores the problem of governing uncertainty in a secular age by focusing on the theological notion of ‘theodicy’ as the underlying rationale for the use of torture in the so-called ...‘war on terror’. With God’s departure from the world, the problem of uncertainty acquires new salience as human beings can no longer explain tragic events as part of a transcendent order and must find immanent causes for the ‘evils’ that surround them. Taking a cue from Max Weber, I discuss how the problem of theodicy – how to reconcile the existence of God with the presence of evil in the world – does not disappear in the secular age but is mobilized through a Foucauldian biopolitical logic. Secular theodicy governs uncertainty through the production of economies of knowledge that rationalize processes of criminalization and securitization of entire groups and justify the use of violence. This process is particularly striking when analysing the use of torture in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Through a comparison with medieval practices and focusing on the cases of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the article shows how secular torture is the product of a biopolitical theodicy aimed at governing uncertainty through the construction of the tortured as immanent evils who threaten our ‘good life’ and ‘deserve’ their treatment. Secular theodicy turns torture into an extreme form of governmentality of uncertainty in which the disciplining of conduct becomes the construction of subjectivities based on essentialist, stereotypical and racist – and for these very reasons, reassuring – economies of knowledge.
RESUMEN El artículo analiza el proceso de disciplinamiento cultural suscitado en la ciudad carbo nífera de en el contexto de las políticas de paternalismo industrial manadas desde el departamento de ...bienestar de la compañía carbonífera de Lota. Para el efecto se estudia el control de las Lota fiestas desenfrenadas con consumo de alcohol y los estímulos entregados a la celebración sobria y cívica de las Fiestas Patrias como momentos de ce lebración que aunaban a la comunidad, integrándola en la idea de patriotismo y com promiso de trabajo que redundaría en el bienestar para los trabajadores y la empresa.
Using China's short‐selling pilot program as a quasi‐experiment, we find that the prospect of short selling has significantly increased conditional accounting conservatism among firms that are ...eligible for short selling, consistent with a short sellers’ disciplining effect hypothesis. When short selling takes position ex post, accounting conservatism starts to decrease with an increased downward pressure on stock prices. Moreover, the short‐selling effect of increased conditional accounting conservatism becomes stronger for state‐owned enterprises, and this effect is accompanied by an increase of unconditional conservatism. As corroborating evidence to support the disciplining hypothesis, we show that accounting conservatism is significantly decreased for firms that are removed from the short‐selling eligibility list. Our results are robust after considering the endogeneity issue in measuring downward stock price pressure, and after constructing the control firms by using both a propensity score matching method and an alternative measure for accounting conservatism. Overall, we provide important evidence on the feedback effects that the capital market has on firm financial reporting.
This article proposes a reassessment of the development of Ḥaredism, that is, the application of strict, maximalist, commandment-oriented Judaism to increasingly large lay publics, in light of ...confessionalization processes in Europe. Whereas historiographical and sociological convention locates the sources of Ḥaredism within the development of 19th century orthodox Jewish responses to the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Reform, and secular Zionism, this article argues that Ḥaredi structures and practices preceded these movements, and, in some cases, influenced their development. The basis for the priority of Ḥaredi identities to Jewish secular identities is rooted in the social disciplining and religious engineering of Jewish societies in the early modern era, until just before the Haskalah, and beyond. This disciplining was predicated on the imposition of religious, social, and ascetic education systems on growing segments of the population. Ḥaredism as a concept and as a phenomenon emerged in 16th century Safed (Ottoman Palestine); there, previous Jewish ascetic patterns were reworked, reorganized and structured under the aegis of the print era, and became a basis for mass, super-regional education. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ḥaredi religiosity steadily percolated through European Jewish societies by means of works of personal ethic and conduct that were written, printed, and reprinted many times, in Hebrew and Yiddish, through works that enumerate the commandments, and through popular works that make the Jewish halakhic code, Shulḥan Arukh, accessible to the masses by abridging or reworking it. Starting in the early 19th century, with the mediation of the Ḥasidic and Lithuanian religious movements, this process massively penetrated broad strata of society.
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