Trajectories of Resistance and Shifting Forms of Workers’ Activism in Iran

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
M. Stella Morgana
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Events ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This article navigates ruptures and transformations in the processes of resistance performed by Iranian workers between two key events of the history of contemporary Iran: the 1979 Revolution and the 2009 Green Movement. It explores how labor activism emerged in the Islamic Republic, and illustrates how it managed to survive. Drawing from the concepts of resistance, collective awareness and counter-conduct as its theoretical basis – between Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault – the article details the changing strategies that workers adopted over time and space to cope with the absence of trade unions, monitoring activities, and repression in the workplace. It demonstrates that workers' agency was never fully blocked by the Islamic Republic. However, it tests the limits imposed by the social context to discourage activism, beyond state coercive measures and policies.

Female Christian prose today: A failed search for new women’s subjectivity?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
E. Chelpanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social System ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In her analysis of books by Maya Kucherskaya, Olesya Nikolaeva, and Yulia Voznesenskaya, the author investigates the history of female Christian prose from the 1990s until the present day. According to the author, it was in the 1990s, the period of crisis and transformation of the social system, that female Christian writers were more vocal, than today, on the issues of the new post-Soviet female subjectivity, drawing on folklore imagery and contrasting the folk, pagan philosophy with the Christian one, defined by an established set of rules and limitations for the principal female roles. Thus, the folklore elements in Kucherskaya’s early works are considered as an attempt to represent female subjectivity. However, the author argues that, in their current work, Kucherskaya and other representatives of the so-called female Christian prose tend to choose different, objectivizing methods to represent female characters. This new and conservative approach may have come from a wider social context, including the state-imposed ‘family values’ program.

Lithium: evidence reconsidered

1997 ◽  
Vol 171 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Moncrieff
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Main Current ◽  
The Social ◽  
Overall Evaluation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Based

This review examines the evidence for the main current recommendations for lithium use in psychiatry and briefly summarises the literature on its adverse consequences, in an attempt to develop an overall evaluation of its potential role based on available evidence. An introduction to the history of lithium is given because it is suggested that in both the 19th and 20th centuries the social context in which lithium emerged, rather than the quality of the scientific evidence, was decisive in determining its adoption as a treatment.

The social context of iron forging on the Kenya coast

Africa ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chapurukha M. Kusimba
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Power ◽  
High Status ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambiguous Position

Ironsmiths occupy an important yet ambiguous position in many African societies. They are both revered and feared, because they wield social power which arises from their access to occult knowledge, not only of metallurgy but of healing, divination, circumcision and peacemaking. In some societies smiths enjoy high status and are the wealthiest people. In others they are feared, covertly maligned, and blamed for societal misfortunes. In still others the smiths' position is often marginal except when they are needed to intercede on their society's behalf to solve natural or cultural predicaments. The forge or smithy plays a central role in the community as tool-making centre, a place of refuge from violence, of purification, and for healing. This article examines the social context of iron forging among the ironsmiths of the Kenya coast, focusing on the role of iron forging in the coastal economy, the forge, the smiths' life cycle, the institution of apprenticeship, the ritual and technical power of smiths, the role of women in the smiths' community, and the future of iron forging on the coast. It is argued that, while coastal smiths are marginal and despised, they hold important ritual and spiritual powers in coastal society. The article concludes that a detailed understanding of the traditional crafts historically practised on the coast can do much to illuminate the complex history of coastal society.

Political Economy: History with the Politics Left Out?

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Backhouse
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis paper argues that Milonakis and Fine, in their bookFrom Political Economy to Economics, offer an account of history that systematically omits discussion of how economics has been shaped by the political and social context in which it developed. This contrasts with work by intellectual historians who have argued that such factors were crucial to understanding the history of economic ideas. It is ironic given that Milonakis and Fine are criticising economists for excluding the political and the social from economics.

Journalistic Organizations: Arenas for Professional and Symbolic Struggles

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Le Cam
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Social Role ◽  
National Level ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Employment Conditions ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
The 19Th Century

From the end of the 19th century until the present, journalists have created associations, trade unions, clubs, and major international networks to organize workers, defend their rights, set out their duties, establish rules of good conduct, and structure their professional journalistic skills. These journalistic organizations are central actors in the history of the professionalization of journalistic groups around the world. They have enabled journalists to make their demands public, exchange views with journalists from other countries, and sometimes even promote and achieve legal recognition of their profession. In general terms, they have provided journalists with fora to discuss their working conditions, their profession, and the social role of the media and journalism. In this way, they have helped to structure not only discourses and practices, but also networks of solidarity at both national and international levels. These organizations can exist in different arenas: within media companies, at the national level, or internationally. And, despite their variety over time, they have often pursued similar objectives: protect journalists’ pay and employment conditions and status; conceive strategies to maintain a certain form of autonomy in authoritarian political contexts; nourish international networking ambitions that have made it possible to disseminate ways of doing and thinking journalism; and finally generate a set of actions that aims to defend the ethics of journalism, the quality of news, and the lives of journalists.

Individuality and habits in institutional economics

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 791-809
Author(s):  
Heath Spong
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Individual Development ◽  
Self Concept ◽  
Structure Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Over Time

AbstractIn this paper a sophisticated conception of individuality is developed that extends beyond simple heterogeneity and is consistent with the approach of institutional economics. Studies of human biological and psychological development are used to illustrate the foundations of human individuality and the impact of the social environment on individual development. The link between the social environment and ongoing agential properties is established through the role of habits, which provide some continuity to individual personalities over time and assist them in navigating the social context they inhabit. Reflexivity is established via an agency-structure framework that endows individuals a changeable self-concept and an ability to interpret their relationship to the social context. The coordination of different individuals is explained not simply through reference to institutional structure, but also through the agent-level properties of shared habits. While reducing differences between individuals to one of degrees, shared habits are shown to be particularly important in the context of agent-sensitive institutions. Finally, the potential for different institutional experiences to impact the reflexivity of individuals is explored.

IV. Big-Business Pressure Groups and Bismarck's Turn to Protectionism, 1873–79

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Böhme
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of

Although the first decade of the German Empire has long been a central topic of historical research, the question with which this essay is concerned—Bismarck's relationship to the pressure groups at this time—cannot be answered satisfactorily on the basis of the material known hitherto. This is due to the fact that until very recently historians have concentrated on the diplomatic-political occurrences. Bismarck's eastern policy, the Livadia affair, the ‘war-in-sight crisis’, the Berlin Congress, and the change from the Three Emperors' Alliance to the ‘Eternal’ Treaty with the Danube monarchy—these are the events always used to demonstrate Bismarck's ‘genius’ in the field of foreign policy. On the problem of the ‘Kulturkampf’ much less effort has been expended. Here Bismarck's outstanding political skill was not as apparent as it was in his judgement of international relations. Moreover, this question was bound up from the very beginning with a strong ideological bias which only slightly weakened after World War II for the first time. Even less attention has been paid to the problems of domestic and social policy and economic developments have been almost totally neglected. It is true that these items have recently obtained new historical relevance from the new socio-political point of view, but up to the present day they have not been clarified. The chief general contributions of this kind have been published by non-German historians (e.g. Rosenberg, Lambi, and Pflanze) in the United States or in Canada. These studies, however, give inadequate answers to specific questions, as do the detailed essays of Karl-Erich Born and Wolfgang Zorn with their systematizing way of reflexion. They do not deal with our formulation of the question: the relationship between economic development and political events in a comparatively short period. Nevertheless, the essays of Born and Zorn will serve as a starting-point for our own investigation. Born in particular realizes the urgent need for more detailed research in the social and economic sphere, and pleads for a ‘supplementary’ approach (Ergänzungsgeschichte). He states thatthe history of the aristocracy during the industrial age has to be completed by studies dealing with the history of the trade unions; by dissertations on the history of industrial branches, commercial centres, and companies; and last but not least by works on the disintegration of the old bourgeoisie. Then we shall be able to extend the political history of the German Empire, which is largely clarified, to a comprehensive view of a German historical epoch by adding the social and economic history of the late nineteeth century.

What makes employees engaged with their work? The role of self-efficacy and employee’s perceptions of social context over time

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Consiglio ◽  
Laura Borgogni ◽  
Cristina Di Tecco ◽  
Wilmar B. Schaufeli
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Work Engagement ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Substantial Contribution ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time

Purpose – Work engagement represents an important aspect of employee well-being and performance and has been related to both job and personal resources. The purpose of this paper, based on Social Cognitive Theory, is to emphasize the proactive role of self-efficacy which is hypothesized to predict work engagement, not only directly, but also indirectly through positive changes in employee’s perceptions of social context (PoSC); namely, perceptions of one’s immediate supervisor, colleagues and top management. Design/methodology/approach – A sample of 741 employees of a communication service company completed two questionnaires, with a time interval of three years. Structural equation modeling was performed in order to test the hypothesized model. Findings – Results revealed that, as expected: first, initial self-efficacy predicts work engagement three years later; and second, positive changes in employee’s perceptions of the social work context across the three year period, mediates the relationship between self-efficacy and work engagement. Research limitations/implications – Results relied only upon self-report data. Moreover, each variable was only measured at the time in which it was hypothesized by the conceptual model. Practical implications – The significant role of self-efficacy as a direct and indirect predictor of work engagement suggests the development of training programs centered on the main sources of self-efficacy, specifically focussed on the social work domain. Originality/value – This research provides evidence of the substantial contribution of self-efficacy to work engagement over time. Moreover, the results also support the beneficial effects of self-efficacy through its influence on the improvements in the individuals’ perceptions of their social context.

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