Free lunch, structural violence, and normalization: A neo-Gramscian analysis of food waste and dumpster diving

Organization ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 135050842097334
Author(s):  
Andreas Plank
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Food Waste ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Structural Level ◽  
Potential Threat ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Dumpster Diving

Augmenting Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence and using multiple data sources this study examines the structural phenomenon food waste and the agentic phenomenon dumpster diving. I derive my interpretations from an analysis of reports on food waste by international organizations, US media coverage of food waste, and interviews with dumpster divers. At the structural level, the analysis shows how international organizations and media frame food waste as an economic and environmental—rather than a social justice issue and how they reproduce hegemonic neoliberal conceptualizations and discourses of food and food waste. At the agentic level, the analysis shows how these hegemonic conceptualizations and discourses affect dumpster divers and how an environmental ideological motivation contains an anticapitalistic ideological motivation. Building on my neo-Gramscian analysis, I highlight the potential threat that environmental discourses might stabilize neoliberal hegemony by offering appealing consent-structures and contain more fundamental, social justice-based, critique of the neoliberal social order. To preserve its inherently critical and counter-hegemonic potential, I develop a conceptual model of food waste and discuss its relevance for critical management and organization studies.

Strategien zur Bekämpfung von Lebensmittelverschwendung im Lichte des wohlgeordneten Rechts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clemens Wirbel
Keyword(s):  
Food Waste ◽  
Food Sharing ◽  
Food Banks ◽  
Legal Limits ◽  
Legislative Proposal ◽  
Dumpster Diving ◽  
First Time ◽  
Legal Consequences

For the first time there is a legal investigation into food waste. Here, the measures of food sharing, food banks, Dumpster Diving and leftover restaurants are classified in the system of food and waste law and e.g the characteristics of a food business and the legal consequences are examined. In addition, based on a French regulation, a legislative proposal to combat food waste is presented and the national and european legal limits of the proposal are discussed.

Modeling the Evaluation Process in a Public Controversy

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 651-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl-Emanuel Dionne ◽  
Chantale Mailhot ◽  
Ann Langley
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Evaluation Process ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Orders Of Worth ◽  
Major Increase ◽  
Over Time

Public controversies have attracted increasing attention in the organization studies literature. They emerge when critical issues are not defined and understood in the same way by different stakeholders, influencing the way they evaluate the worth of other actors, objects, and situations. In this paper, we show how the “orders of worth” perspective of Boltanski and Thévenot may throw light on the evolution of an evaluation process occurring during a public controversy. In particular, we study the Quebec student conflict of 2011 and 2012 that followed a proposed major increase in higher education tuition fees. We conducted an in-depth case study based on media coverage of the actions and discourses of the major actors to examine how objects and actions associated with a controversy are successively defined, redefined, and evaluated over time through a series of tests of worth. Our article contributes to the organizational literature on public controversies by drawing attention to the role of six types of evaluative moves in situations of controversy, and by offering an abductively developed model for understanding the evaluation process as it evolves over time. We suggest that actors, through these evaluative moves, may displace the object of a test, and therefore the foci for evaluation, through actions intended to bolster their positions.

scholarly journals Lost and Forgotten: Missing and Murdered Sex Workers on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

INvoke ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jori Dusome
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Postal Code ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Marginalized Women ◽  
The Media

From 1978 to 2002, more than 60 women went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area that has often been described as “Canada’s poorest postal code”. For decades, families of the area’s missing women filed police reports and engaged with the media about their vanished loved ones, however little headway was made in the case until ten years later, when the Vancouver Sun began publishing a series of stories on the women that drew provincial and national attention. Motivated by citizen dissent and accusations of negligence, The Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP finally launched a joint task force, resulting in the arrest and conviction of Robert “Willie” Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, for the serial murders of street-involved women. The subsequent excavation of the Pickton property became the largest criminal investigation in Canadian history, spanning several years and costing tens of millions of dollars. However, the danger and violence that plagued women on the Downtown Eastside remained largely the same for many years after Pickton’s arrest. While media coverage narrated Pickton as a single deranged male, this narrative effectively eliminated the context of the broader social background that thrust these women into harm’s way. In this paper, I will discuss the racialization, spatialization, and class distinctions that heavily influence women's participation in the sex trade, as well the media narratives that enable an understanding of Pickton as a violent outlier. The research shows that despite these narratives, violence against marginalized women is a part of the normative social order, which is precisely what allows violent men to function without apprehension in these communities for so long. As you will read, violence against women cannot be described as simply the action of a few bad apples, but is instead a larger part of a “continuum of violence” enacted against already marginalized women. Keywords: MMIWG, Robert Pickton, sexual violence, street-level sex work

The Violence of Care

2019 ◽  
pp. 114-142
Author(s):  
Felicity Aulino
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Sides

This chapter addresses questions of structural violence and stasis in relation to the hierarchy and habituation in various forms of care. In many powerful analyses, structural violence is the term given to systematic limits placed on individual agency. This naming has served to illuminate systems of oppression and inequality. And yet, notions of individual agency, like intention, emerge differently in different historical and philosophical traditions. The chapter then demonstrates how Thai social worlds habituate people to feel themselves as part of collectives and to provide for one another through maintaining differentiated roles within groups, which forces one to consider anew people's complicity with repressive social forms. That is, one must reckon with the forms of care that emerge in and sustain oppression. Compassion and pity can thus come into view as two sides of what may be the same coin, with implications for humanitarianism beyond the borders of Thailand. Limitations are placed on individual agency in a multitude of ways in contemporary Thai society. As such, the stakes of altering norms are high because care is enacted through patronage and patterned into micro- and macrostructures. Ultimately, understanding the social training of awareness toward different modes of providing for others may lead to novel ways of approaching social change and working for social justice, in Thailand and elsewhere.

‘Framing figures’ and the campaign for sex purchase criminalisation in Ireland: A Lakoffian analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-332
Author(s):  
Eilís Ward
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Red Light ◽  
The State ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Use Of Data ◽  
The Status ◽  
Recent Reform

If the concept of social justice posits equality and fairness between subjects in the social order, then the presence of those subjects within that order must first and foremost be acknowledged. In Ireland’s recent reform of prostitution law contained in the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, the presence of the sex worker as a rights-bearing subject or citizen, with access to justice in that capacity, was denied. In this article I focus on the use of data by the neo-abolitionist ‘Turn off the Red Light’ campaign to ‘flatten out’ the complexity of sex workers lives and present the figure of the ‘vulnerable prostituted woman’ and the ‘trafficking victim’: tragic, abject, a necessarily violated person and in need of ‘protection’ from the state. I argue that this data, entering public and political discourse as uncontestable truth, constituted what I call, ‘framing figures’, framing an inevitable outcome and precluding certain subjects from the status of equality and fairness. The data allowed campaigners for the Sex Purchase Ban (SPB), and, in turn the state, to eclipse a social justice approach to sex work, such as proposed by the Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland and other actors.

scholarly journals The scientization of the world polity: International organizations and the production of scientific knowledge, 1950–2015

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Zapp
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Sociology Of Science ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Research Capacity ◽  
Scientific Output ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Organizational Diversity ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
Nutrition Research

While recent concepts from the sociology of science stress novel sites of knowledge production (e.g. government, industry), they ignore international organizations’ (IOs) growing research capacity. Conversely, prevailing theories of IOs stress their regulative and normative influence in national policymaking, equally neglecting their scientific work. Using bibliometric data for a large sample of 1325 international organizations, this work examines, for the first time, the evolution of scientific output from international intergovernmental research organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations in the period 1950–2015. The analysis finds a striking increase in scientific activity since the late 1980s and particularly since the early 2000s across organizational types, sectors (e.g. law, nutrition), research fields (e.g. life science, social sciences), output formats (e.g. articles, books), and geographic areas. Indeed, some of these organizations are among the most productive science producers worldwide. Additional analyses of IOs’ research collaborations suggest strong cross-organizational diversity reflecting wider trends of scientific internationalization and integration. The article argues that IOs’ scientization requires a thorough revision of theories of institutional change in science and research systems and of theories about the nature and role of IOs. These organizations reflect, and, indeed, spearhead, wider trends of the rationalization of social order and evidence-based global governance.

Communicating Terror: Mediatization and Ritualization

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-162
Author(s):  
Xi Cui ◽  
Eric Rothenbuhler
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Flows ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Fear And Anxiety ◽  
Terrorist Acts

In this essay, we explicate the internal logic of contemporary terrorist acts and our society’s responses, to denaturalize the label and meanings we give to “terrorism.” We argue that contemporary terrorism communicates intimidation, fear, and anxiety through the ritualization and mediatization of terrorist attacks. Mediatization refers to the strategic coercion of imperative media coverage of the attacks, and ritualization refers to the focus on sacred life structures in both terrorist attacks and remedial responses. In combining ritualization and mediatization, terrorism aims to introduce maximal chaos through unexpected disruption of the sacred and taken-for-granted in everyday life in the community of the attack and wherever media coverage can reach. The fear and anxiety induced by disrupted life rhythms, including normal media flows, and the compelling footage of the disruption lead to ritualized reactions which both restore and transform the social order beyond the moment of the attack.

Riding a Line: Competition and Cooperation in the Sport of Bicycle Racing

1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Albert
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
Competition And Cooperation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bicycle Racing ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Individual Effort ◽  
Formal Rules

The subculture of bicycle racing provides a situation in which the relationship between formal rules and dominant sport ideologies, and the taken-for-granted informal structures produced by athletes during competition, may be observed. Ethnographic and interview data suggest that such structures as pelotons and pacelines create both the opportunity for and the requirement of cooperative efforts between opponents, standing in stark contrast to more conventional conceptions of sport in which only unambiguous conflict between competitors is seen as legitimate. Here the informal norms of cooperation are central to insider definitions of the social order and are accompanied by strong sanctions for noncompliance. This cooperative informal order is seen as especially problematic for novices, as it diverges from widely held beliefs in the independence of competing units and the importance of overcoming opponents through maximum individual effort. Media coverage of the sport, in disregarding cooperative efforts, both creates and perpetuates erroneous stereotypes, making socialization into the sport more difficult.

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