Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This presentation is a chapter from ethnographic research whose aim was to study the social representations of Israeli elementary school staffs, which direct children from the general educational system into various special education frameworks. An interpretive analysis of the findings found a continuous social selection process directing children into various education careers, removing certain children from the normative system.
The Israeli school system’s declared ideological position is one of inclusion and opposes exclusions. Despite “the class” as the basic structural element of the elementary school, a fundamentally inclusive construct designed to take in all of the region’s children, many institutions have been built into the school to serve stratification and exclusion. One of the most outstanding was the psychological educational diagnostic test. On one hand the ideology of the psychological diagnosis, in the educational discourse was one of inclusion and assistance in mainstreaming children, based on an egalitarian social outlook; on the other hand, in practice, the psychological diagnosis has served as a classifying and excluding tool representing a stratified, hierarchical social outlook.
The representation of the diagnostic test as an “objective” instrument supporting exclusion, camouflages the removal of children into the special education track. . The decision to direct the child to a special education framework almost inevitably follows testing, and the evaluation becomes an irretrievable act, a kind of ritual of exclusion. Thus, the decision to send a child for psychological diagnostic testing has become almost identical with the decision to exclude him from the normative system.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Within the literature on the pro-life movement and anti-abortion politics, some have suggested a link between the size of pro-life religious communities relative to the population demographics in particular areas, lack of/perceived lack of political opportunity, and breakdowns in state social control with greater amounts of anti-abortion terrorism. The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze these assertions. Preliminary quantitative analysis indicates that there is more anti-abortion terrorism in places where pro-life religious denominations do not make up a majority of the religious adherents. These findings are in contrast with one of the most publicized examples of anti-abortion terrorism the shootings in Pensacola, FL. In this case abortion providers were shot in a city with a large pro-life religious community that has tended to be less than welcoming to providers of abortion services, and is in a state that has repeatedly attempted to place restriction on access to abortion. While this case runs counter to earlier analyses it provides an opportunity for discussion of anti-abortion violence in specific, as well as terrorism in general, as an extra-legal form of conflict resolution and inter-group social control.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Drawing upon an in-depth, ethnographic study of the organization behind the annual Burning Man event, I show how members enacted organizing through stories or narratives. Stories helped structure individuals’ action in two ways. First, stories served as constraints by setting and clarifying boundaries on permissible and desired actions. Second, stories served as enablers by supporting collective efforts. Based on analysis of informally and formally told stories, I found that stories helped invigorate organizing by charisimizing the routine. Stories inspired and reinforced meaning and agency, aspects that organizing structures like rules cannot provide on their own.

This study makes three contributions to the research on narratives and organizations. First, this study documents an everyday, shared activity that constitutes organizing - the codification and dissemination of information among storytellers and their audiences. Second, this study provides a more nuanced understanding of how members are both collectively shaped by and shape the organizing experience. These analyses show how storytelling can serve as a means of reinforcing control by assimilating new and continuing members. At the same time, these analyses show how storytelling can also serve as a generative catalyst for change. Third, in uncovering micro-level interactions, we can more strongly link structure with agency.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Recent decades have witnessed the growth of a masculinity-in-decline narrative which posits a world in which (white) masculinity is increasingly under siege by a variety of cultural forces. This narrative has been particularly prominent in depictions of the contemporary work world, once an overwhelmingly masculine province, where both the increasing presence of the female bodies of women workers and the increasing “feminization” of work practices (such as preferred approaches to managing employees) have been perceived in some quarters as posing a distinct threat to masculinity’s centrality. Against this backdrop, in 1997 the Miller Brewing Company began to air a series of advertisements designed to resuscitate its High Life brand of beer – a brand that pioneered the overuse of masculinity as beer advertising tactic, but which had experienced a very real decline in sales since the late 1970s. The campaign, which lasted until 2005, invoked, in ironic fashion, the narrative of masculinity-in-decline through the mythical character of the “High Life Man.” This essay offers a critical examination of the manner in which these ads offered a “solution” to the crisis of masculinity by reasserting an excessive “manliness” in leisure to compensate for the threats to masculinity at work. In doing so, the ads both conformed and transformed the generic conventions of beer advertising that the brand helped establish in the first place, simultaneously reinscribing and critically satirizing hegemonic masculinity in the process.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study investigates the role of religious and ethical values in the public life of UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. We inquire as to whether the office makes the official or conversely whether the official makes the office. Does the office, shaped as it is by legal and political factors, leave little room for personal values? Or can the religious and ethical values of the official find expression despite the legal mandate and political necessities of public office? We hypothesize that Perez de Cuellar's personal values, stemming from a Catholic and humane value system, often fit very well with the norms of the UN Charter and especially its human rights provisions. On the other hand, we hypothesize that some policies he chose required an abandoning - or at least the holding in temporary abeyance - of some of his preferred values. We conclude that his personal values, chiefly the belief in the ethics of neutrality, were deeply intertwined with his calculations of what the law allowed and what the political traffic would bear, yet what was primary in the exercise of influence from that office was the political context.