Producing Difference

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Eli Revelle Yano Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Differentiated Service ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
Workplace Policies ◽  
Service Brands ◽  
Service Jobs ◽  
Dining Room ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Supervisory Practices ◽  
Back Office

This chapter shows how management structures a socially divided workplace from the back office. Chefs and dining room supervisors at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood channel workers into distinct types of service jobs based on socially coded ideals, and subject each group of workers to divergent supervisory practices. I argue that management’s strategic decisions regarding hiring, service protocols, and workplace policies adhere to an overarching logic of upscale service packaged with powerful race, class, and gender assumptions, as well as strategically differentiated service brands that nuance how each workplace is organized. Wilson shows how service brands shape the kinds of social relations and labor prospects that workers encounter.

Sales Work under Marketization: The Social Relations of the Cash Nexus?

2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 707-728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski ◽  
Ursula Ott
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Product Market ◽  
Front Line ◽  
Specific Product ◽  
Referral Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
Service Jobs ◽  
Sales Work ◽  
Back Office

In lightly regulated economies many jobs are becoming subject to a process of ‘marketization’ involving an externalization of the employment relationship in the context of intensified product market competition. At the same time, a number of front-line jobs are becoming redefined to encompass more proactive sales aims. This study examines two sites at an intersection of these trends — sites where financial service jobs have been marketized and redefined to revolve around proactive sales activity. It examines the key social relations of the sales workers — relations with managers, immediate colleagues, back-office staff, customers and referrers — in considering how far marketization leads to the social relations of the cash nexus along bare market principles. It is found that one group of workers is enmeshed in a dehumanized, instrumental and antagonistic set of relations, while another, smaller, group of workers is insulated against such relations by the functioning of tight trust-based referral networks. It is concluded that the texture of the social relations of sales work under marketization is centrally influenced by the social constitution of the specific product market in which sales workers act. In addition, it is argued that the process of marketization tends to corrode the factors that support the functioning of tight trust-based networks.

Vietnamese Weddings

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thuc-Doan T. Nguyen ◽  
Russell Belk
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
And Gender

This article examines the historical role of marriage and wedding rituals in Vietnam, and how they have changed during Vietnam’s transition to the market. The authors focus on how changes reflect the society’s increasing dependence on the market, how this dependence impacts consumer well-being, and the resulting implications for public policy. Changes in the meanings, function, and structure of wedding ritual consumption are examined. These changes echo shifts in the national economy, social values, social relations, and gender roles in Vietnamese society during the transition. The major findings show that Vietnamese weddings are reflections of (1) the roles of wedding rituals as both antecedents and outcomes of social changes, (2) the nation’s perception and imagination of its condition relative to “modernity,” and (3) the role of China as a threatening “other” seen as impeding Vietnam’s progress toward “modernization.”

scholarly journals Rurality, Ethnicity, and Gender Patterns of Cultural Continuity during the “Great Disjuncture” in the R.M. of Hanover, 1945-1961

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Royden Loewen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Local Experience ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Gender Patterns ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender

Abstract Rural Canadian communities underwent profound changes as they adapted to the economic and social context after World War II. Those changes, may be described, using John Shaver's phrase, as a "Great Disjuncture". From a "centrist" point-of-view Canadian farms became more fully mechanized, products commodified and farm goals integrated with government policy. This paper focuses on the "local experience" of the "Great Disjuncture". Its subject is the Rural Municipality of Hanover in Manitoba, an ethnic community, dominated by Low German-speaking Mennonites. In Hanover traditional social relations, both on the primary level affecting gender and on the community level affecting the very idea of rurality, entered a dialectical relationship with the forces for change to create a particular localized culture. Here was an instance of cultural re-creation.

scholarly journals Against the Grain: Socially Just Social Science from the Standpoint of Roxana Ng (Review Essay)

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-159
Author(s):  
Elaine Coburn
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
The Political ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Varied Work

This contribution seeks to highlight the important scholarship of Roxana Ng, arguably one of Canadian sociology and political economy’s most underappreciated theorists. Like her activism, Ng’s academic work is both wide-ranging yet firmly focused on major, unjust inequalities. Her research particularly concerns the Canadian capitalist political economy but inevitably, given the embeddedness of these social relations within worldwide historical relations, stretches beyond national borders. In particular, Ng sought to unpack the everyday, intertwined – exploitative and unjust – relations of class, race, and gender, and the ways these unjust relations are articulated through migration and citizenship. This contribution situates the reception and uneven uptake of Ng’s varied work before critically analysing her contributions to understanding (1) immigrant women’s labour in Canada, (2) the complex racialized, gendered relations of power in the academy, and (3) the liberatory potential of embodied epistemologies, specifically Qi Gong meditation. In the conclusions, I consider the overall contributions and some contradictions of her work, in moving from the local to the global, and from the personal to the political.

Diversity and Relationships

2020 ◽  
pp. 114-150
Author(s):  
Mona Sue Weissmark
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Selection ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clinical Consequences ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
And Gender

This chapter outlines key issues in scientific literature concerning how evolutionary processes have shaped the human mind. To that end, psychologists have drawn on Charles Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis, or how males compete for reproduction and the role of female choice in the process. Darwin argued that evolution hinged on the diversity resulting from sexual reproduction. Evolutionary psychologists posit that heterosexual men and women evolved powerful, highly patterned, and universal desires for particular characteristics in a mate. Critics, however, contend that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection was erroneous, in part because his ideas about sexual identity and gender were influenced by the social mores of his elite Victorian upper class. Despite this critique, some researchers argue similarly to Darwin that love is part of human biological makeup. According to their hypotheses, cooperation is the centerpiece of human daily life and social relations. This makes the emotion of love, both romantic and maternal love, a requirement not just for cooperation, but also for the preservation and perpetuation of the species. That said, researchers speculate that encounters with unfamiliar people, coincident with activated neural mechanisms associated with negative judgments, likely inspire avoidance behavior and contribute to emotional barriers. This suggests the need to further study the social, psychological, and clinical consequences of the link between positive and negative emotions.

Sachs, Chavafambira, Maggie: Prurience or the Pathology of Social Relations?

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grahame Hayes
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Traditional Healer ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
The South ◽  
The Social ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

Black Hamlet (1937; reprinted 1996) tells the story of Sachs's association with John Chavafambira, a Manyika nganga (traditional healer and diviner), who had come to Johannesburg from his home in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Sachs's fascination with Chavafambira was initially as a “research subject” of a psychoanalytic investigation into the mind of a sane “native”. Over a period of years Sachs became inextricably drawn into the suffering and de-humanization experienced by Chavafambira as a poor, black man in the urban ghettoes that were the South Africa of the 1930s and 1940s. It is easy these days to want to dismiss Sachs's “project” as the prurient gaze of a white, liberal psychiatrist. This would not only be an ahistorical reading of Black Hamlet, but it would also diminish the possibilities offered by what Said (1994) calls, a contrapuntal reading. I shall present a reading of Black Hamlet, focusing on the three main characters - Sachs, Chavafambira, and Maggie (Chavafambira's wife) - as emblematic of the social relations of the other, racial(ised) bodies, and gender.

The hearthhold in pastoral Fulbe society, central Mali: social relations, milk and drought

Africa ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirjam de Bruijn
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Economic Viability ◽  
Social Unit ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Nomadic Pastoralists ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Social Units

AbstractIn pastoral Fulbe society in central Mali women had and in some degree still have an important social and economic role, concentrated on a milk economy organised through a special female-headed, women-centred unit called by the Fulbe fayannde, or ‘hearthhold’. In a society of semi-nomadic pastoralists who live most of the year in small social units, social relations and networks are very important, perhaps even crucial to the success of their main survival strategy, which is transhumant cattle-keeping. In the literature on the Fulbe this social unit has received relatively little attention. An analysis from the perspective of the ‘hearthhold’ sheds new light on property and gender relations in Fulbe society in general.Drought has had an enormous impact on the situation of the Jallube studied in this article. Economic change—a switch to agriculture and production for the market—has brought about a shift of focus for the men. Economically, milk is no longer essential for them, and hence the fayannde loses its importance; socially, too, the role of the fayannde, as symbolised by milk, is changing. For women the erosion of the fayannde is serious: an analysis of marriage gifts shows how important the fayannde is not only to the social organisation of the Jallube but also to their economic viability. In times of stress this importance may be greater for women than for men. The decline of the fayannde may lead to a transformation of gender relations, the marriage ceremony and women's social security—changes that the return of the rains or the re-establishment of herds may not reverse.

Subjectivity and Subjectivation

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
Socialist Feminism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Foucauldian Theory ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms

A chapter addressing the formation of the subject, and the rejection of the assumption that gender and sex are simply given, in various feminist theory paradigms. The project of advancing gender justice requires close attention to the ways in which categories of biological sex and gender, in intersectional relations with race, ethnicity, nationality, class and so on, are historically constructed and deployed to bring subjects into being, even as these same categories are resisted and re-negotiated at the same time in an always agonistic field of social relations. Special reference is made to three pairs of theoretical paradigms and practitioners: liberal feminism and Nancy J. Hirschmann; antiracist socialist feminism and Angela Davis; Derridean-Foucauldian theory and Judith Butler.

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