The “Supermen” Club: Organizational Secrecy and Masculine Identity in an Israeli National Security Organization

2022 ◽  
pp. 0095327X2110649
Author(s):  
Aluma Kepten
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
National Security ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Masculine Identity ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Do So ◽  
Male Workers ◽  
The Way

How does secrecy shape narratives of militarized hegemonic masculinity? This article assesses a gap at the intersection between theories of masculinities and organizational secrecy. Supported by 15 interviews with current and former male workers of a covert section of an Israeli national security organization, it argues that secrecy is experienced as both an external hurdle and a central component to the way that men internalize masculinity. Unable to access social capital outside the security organization, the respondents of the study construct a social field inside it through which they can assert their masculinity. They do so by conceptualizing their jobs, themselves, and the organization through a prism of sacrificial warriorhood, and actively incorporate secrecy’s constraints into a narrative of “super-men”. This study thus examines secrecy in the context of a militarized environment, showing the experience of masculinity and a perceived lack of power-access among members of a dominant group.

scholarly journals Balbúrdia: a polissemia enquanto interpretante do confronto entre vozes sociais (“Balbúrdia”: polysemy whilst interpreting of conflict between social voices)

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 4459142
Author(s):  
Débora Luciene Porto Boenavides
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Current Management ◽  
Oppressed People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theory Of Discourse ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

This article aims to analyse the polysemy as an interpreting of conflicts between social voices, and it is based on the dialogical theory of discourse and on the enunciation theory of Benveniste. To do so, it is verified the way polysemy marks the confrontation between social voices: a) as an oppressive designation given by dominant groups to the oppressed people and as a strategy of revaluation of the oppressive words by oppressed groups and b) as a critical designation of the dominated groups to their oppressors and as an attempt of the dominant group to revaluate/neutralize the critical dominations given to it by the oppressed groups. Then, it is observed a contemporary example of the mentioned phenomenon: the word revaluation of “balbúrdia”, in 2019, used by Brazilian university students, in response to a polemic statement of Abraham Weintraub, Minister of Education of the current management. It is found that the social contradictions do not enclose in one or other statement, they should be observed through the dialogue stablished between different social voices.ResumoEste artigo objetiva analisar a polissemia enquanto interpretante dos confrontos entre vozes sociais, tendo como base a teoria dialógica do discurso e a teoria enunciativa de Benveniste. Para isso, verifica-se de que modo a polissemia marca o confronto entre vozes sociais: a) como designação opressora dada pelos grupos dominantes aos oprimidos e como estratégia de revalorização de vocábulos opressores por grupos oprimidos; b) como designação crítica dos grupos dominados aos seus opressores e como tentativa do grupo dominante de revalorizar/neutralizar as denominações críticas dadas a ele pelos grupos oprimidos. Após, observa-se um exemplo contemporâneo do citado fenômeno: a revalorização vocabular da palavra “balbúrdia”, em 2019, por estudantes universitários brasileiros, em resposta a um enunciado polêmico de Abraham Weintraub, enquanto Ministro da Educação da atual gestão. Constata-se que as contradições sociais não se encerram em um ou outro enunciado, devendo ser observadas através do diálogo travado entre as diferentes vozes sociais.Palavras-chave: “Balbúrdia”, Contradições sociais, Polissemia, Revalorização vocabular. Keywords: “Balbúrdia”, Social contradictions, Polysemy, Word revaluation.ReferencesBAKHTIN, Mikhail Mjkhailovitch. Estética da criação verbal. Tradução feita a partir do francês por Maria Emsantina Galvão G. Pereira. 5ª Ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1997.BAKHTIN, Mikhail Mjkhailovitch. Estética da criação verbal. Tradução feita a partir do russo por Paulo Bezerra. 2ª Ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2010.BENVENISTE, Émile. Problemas de linguística geral II. Tradução Eduardo Guimarães. Campinas, SP: Pontes, 2006.BOENAVIDES, Débora Luciene Porto. Ressignificar e resistir: a Marcha das Vadias e a apropriação da denominação opressora. Revista Estudos Feministas, Florianópolis, v. 27, n. 2, e48405, 2019.BOURDIEU, Pierre. A Economia das Trocas Linguísticas: O que Falar Quer Dizer. Prefácio Sergio Miceli. 2. ed. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008CALVET, Louis-Jean. Linguistique et colonialisme: petit traité de glottophagie. Paris: Payot, 1974.ENGELS, Federico. Anti-Dühring. La revolución de la ciencia por el señor Eugen Dühring. Colección Clásicos Del Marxismo. Madrid: Fundación Federico Engels, 2014.VOLOCHÍNOV, Valentin Nikolaevich. A construção da enunciação e outros ensaios. São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores, 2013.VOLÓCHINOV, Valentin Nikolaevich. Marxismo e Filosofia da Linguagem: problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. Tradução, notas e glossário de Sheila Grillo e Ekaterina Vólkova Américo; ensaio Introdutório de Sheila Grillo. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2017.Notícias, memes etc.Estadão, 30/04/2019. Disponível em: https://educacao.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,mec-cortara-verba-de-universidade-por-balburdia-e-ja-mira-unb-uff-e-ufba,70002809579Estadão, 15/05/2019. Disponível em: https://politica.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,entenda-o-que-levou-a-balburdia-as-ruas-de-todo-o-pais,70002830399O Dia, 1º/05/2019. Disponível em: https://odia.ig.com.br/brasil/2019/05/5638622-mec-recua-de-punir-universidades-por--balburdia--e-propoe-corte-linear.html#foto=1e4459142

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

Finding a Pastoral Idiom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathilde Skoie
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces yet another European ‘repossession’ of Virgil that generally remains outside the scope of most volumes on translation and reception. Skoie focuses on three Norwegian translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and analyses the way they exhibit tendencies towards two complementary processes that have been labelled, in recent theories of translation, as ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’; and they do so as the language of translation becomes politicized and engaged in debates about Norwegian identity. Skoie explores the use of Virgilian pastoral idiom in a foreign language and the juxtaposition between rural and urban voices in the context of language politics.

scholarly journals Wider-community Segregation and the Effect of Neighbourhood Ethnic Diversity on Social Capital: An Investigation into Intra-Neighbourhood Trust in Great Britain and London

Sociology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 1011-1033 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Laurence
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Hierarchical Linear Models ◽  
Negatively Associated ◽  
Community Segregation ◽  
Do So

Extensive research has demonstrated that neighbourhood ethnic diversity is negatively associated with intra-neighbourhood social capital. This study explores the role of segregation and integration in this relationship. To do so it applies three-level hierarchical linear models to two sets of data from across Great Britain and within London, and examines how segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested impacts trust amongst neighbours. This study replicates the increasingly ubiquitous finding that neighbourhood diversity is negatively associated with neighbour-trust. However, we demonstrate that this relationship is highly dependent on the level of segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested. Increasing neighbourhood diversity only negatively impacts neighbour-trust when nested in more segregated wider-communities. Individuals living in diverse neighbourhoods nested within integrated wider-communities experience no trust-penalty. These findings show that segregation plays a critical role in the neighbourhood diversity/trust relationship, and that its absence from the literature biases our understanding of how ethnic diversity affects social cohesion.

scholarly journals Colonial management as a social field: The Palestinian remaking of Israel’s system of spatial control

2021 ◽  
pp. 001139212110246
Author(s):  
Walid Habbas ◽  
Yael Berda
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Spatial Control ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Economic Elite ◽  
The Everyday

This article delves into the everyday dynamics of colonial rule to outline a novel way of understanding colonized–colonizer interactions. It conceives colonial management as a social field in which both the colonized and colonizers negotiate and exchange resources, despite their decidedly unequal positions within a racial hierarchy. Drawing their example from the West Bank, the authors argue that a Palestinian economic elite has proactively participated in the co-production of the colonial management of spatial mobility, a central component of Israeli colonial rule. The study employs interviews and document analysis to investigate how the nexus between Palestine’s commercial-logistical needs and Israel’s security complex induced large-scale Palestinian producers to exert agency and reorder commercial mobility. The authors describe and explain the evolution of a ‘Door-to-Door’ logistical arrangement, in which large-scale Palestinian traders participate in extending Israeli’s system of spatial control in exchange for facilitating logistical mobility. This horizontal social encounter that entails pay-offs is conditioned, but not fully determined, by vertical relations of domination and subordination.

On Virtue and Reason: Integrative Theory of De 德 and Aretê

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-183
Author(s):  
Chung-ying Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Effective Action ◽  
Confucian Ethics ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Moral Consciousness ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Integrative Theory ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article is to argue that virtue is experienced and understood in Confucian ethics as power to act and as performance of a moral action, and that virtue (de 德) as such has to be onto-cosmologically explicated, not just teleologically explained. In other words, it is intended to construct an integrative theory of virtues based on both dao (the Way 道) and de. To do so, we will examine the two features of de, as the power that is derived from self-reflection and self-restraining, and as the motivated action for attaining its practical end in a community. Only by a self-integrated moral consciousness can one’s experience, action and ideal remain in consistency and coherence, which leads us to the Aristotelian notion of virtue as excellence (aretê) and enables us to see how virtue as aretê could be introduced as a second feature of de, namely as the power for effective action in the whole system of virtues, apart from the first feature of de as self-restraining power. We will conclude that reason and virtue are practically united and remain inseparable, and that taking into account the onto-cosmological foundation of virtues, reason and virtue are inevitably the moving and advancing forces for the formation and transformation of human morality just as they are motivating and prompting incentives for individual moral action.

scholarly journals Building Eminence through Evidence

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (Suppl. 1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Horgan
Keyword(s):  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Personalised Medicine ◽  
Healthcare Systems ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Front Line ◽  
New Developments ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

With modern-day medicine going the way it is - new developments, great science, the advent of personalised medicine and more - there's little doubt that healthcare can move in the right direction if everything is put in place to allow it to do so. But in many areas progress is being halted. Or at the very least slowed. Like it or not, many front-line healthcare professionals still do things the way they did things three decades ago, and are reluctant to adapt to new methods (assuming they are aware of them). Evidence exists that today's rapidly developing new medicines and treatments can positively influence healthcare in modern-day Europe, but a gap in education (also applying to patients and politicians), often exacerbated by “fake news” on the internet, is hampering uptake of new and often better methods, while even causing doubts about vaccines. More understanding at every level will inevitably lead to swifter integration of innovation into the healthcare systems of Europe. The time to look, listen and learn has come.

scholarly journals Moral hypocrisy and the hedonic shift: A goal-framing approach

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siegwart Lindenberg ◽  
Linda Steg ◽  
Marko Milovanovic ◽  
Anita Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Situational Cues ◽  
Moral Hypocrisy ◽  
Goal Framing ◽  
Normative Consensus ◽  
Moral Stance ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

The most investigated form of moral hypocrisy is pragmatic hypocrisy in which people fake moral commitment for their own advantage. Yet there is also a different form of hypocrisy in which people take a moral stance with regard to norms they endorse without thereby also expressing a commitment to act morally. Rather they do it in order to feel good. We call this hedonic moral hypocrisy. In our research, we posit that this kind of hypocrisy comes about when people’s overarching goals are shifted in a hedonic direction, that is, in the direction of focusing on the way one feels, rather than on moral obligation. Hedonic shifts come about by cues in the environment. People are sometimes sincere when expressing a moral stance (i.e. they mean it and also act on it), and sometimes, when they are subject to a hedonic shift, they express a moral stance just to make them feel good. This also implies that they then decline to do things that make them feel bad, such as behaving morally when it takes unrewarded effort to do so. In two experimental studies, we find that there is such a thing as hedonic moral hypocrisy and that it is indeed brought about by hedonic shifts from cues in the environment. This seriously undermines the meaning of a normative consensus for norm conformity. Seemingly, for norm conformity without close social control, it is not enough that people endorse the same norms, they also have to be exposed to situational cues that counteract hedonic shifts. In the discussion, it is suggested that societal arrangements that foster the focus on the way one feels and nurture a chronic wish to make oneself feel better (for example, in the fun direction through advertisements and entertainment opportunities, or in the fear direction by populist politicians, social media, economic uncertainties, crises, or wars and displacements) are likely to increase hedonic hypocrisy in society.

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