Suchergebnisse

An investigation of the influence of bureaucratic language in corporate organization, & the responses of liberal & radical feminists to this influence. Through Michel Foucault's analysis of speech & power, organizational discourse is demonstrated to be normative, eg, as in the bureaucratic category of personnel management. A review of recent literature on personnel management reveals a four-pronged process of legitimation through which discourse reflects a hierarchy of power: (1) Workers are described as objects to be manipulated for the needs of the organization. (2) The personnel bureaucracy has established legitimacy by describing itself as a resource for other bureaucracies. (3) Problems are described as resulting from misallocation of individuals, rather than from the organizational structure. (4) The discourse effectively establishes the organizational structure as unalterable by co-opting terms that suggest change -- a process that may also be called "mystification." The liberal feminist response involves accepting existing organizational structures & formulating strategies for integrating women into them, albeit with the codicil that such game-playing is infantile, if necessary. The radical response recognizes the price paid by those who are voluntarily subsumed in the organizational system, & eschews it, preferring to form antibureaucratic structures that stress egalitarian values & shared resources. A. Padgett.

Within the Marxist theory of history and society, the concept of class consciousness has played a major, though problematic, role. The proper interpretation of this concept, embedded as it is within the complex relational framework of the historical dialectic, has presented a perennial problem to the interpreters of Marx, both the theorists and the activists. For both logical and practical reasons, class consciousness can be seen as the Achilles' heel of the Marxist scheme.

"What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented here take fresh stock of globalization's complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge. The geographic emphasis on Asia/Pacific highlights the complexity of globalizing practices among specific people whose dilemmas come alive on these pages. Although the book focuses on global, gendered flows, it expands its investigation to include the media and the arts, intellectual resources, activist agendas, and individual life stories. First-rate ethnographies and interviews reach beyond generalizations and bring Pacific and Asian women and men alive in their struggles against globalization."--Book cover

"Everywhere you look in Hawaiʻi, you might see the military. And yet, in daily life few residents see the military at all -- it is hidden in plain sight. This paradox of invisibility and visibility, of the available and the hidden, is the subject of Oh, Say, Can You See?, which maps the power relations involving gender, race, and class that define Hawaiʻi in relation to the national security state. Western intruders into Hawaiʻi -- from the early explorers, missionaries, and sugar planters to the military, tourists, and foreign investors -- have seen the island nation as a feminine place, waiting to embrace those who come to penetrate, protect, mold, and develop, yet conveniently lacking whatever the newcomers claim to possess. Thus feminized, this book contends, the islands and the people have been reinscribed with meanings according to the needs, fears, and desires of outsiders. Authors Kathy E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull locate and "excavate" sites of memory, such as cemeteries, memorials, monuments, and museums, to show how the military constructs its gendered narrative upon prior colonial discourses. Among the sites considered are Fort DeRussy, Pearl Harbor, and Punchbowl Cemetery, as well as the practices of citizenship that are produced or foreclosed by the narratives of order and security written upon Hawaiʻi by the military. This semiotic investigation of ways the military marks Hawaiʻi necessarily explores the intersection of immigration, colonialism, military expansion, and tourism on the islands. Attending to the ways in which the military represents itself and others represent the military, the authors locate the particular representational elements that both conceal and reveal the military's presence and power; in doing so, they seek to expand discursive space so that other voices can be heard."--Provided by publisher

Ira Rohter, professor of political science at the University of Hawai'i since 1968, passed away on June 22, 2009. He was well known in the community as a leading scholar-activist. Professor Rohter wrote the pathbreaking book A Green Hawaii: A Sourcebook for Development Alternatives. It helped others to see the possibilities for going beyond criticism of the current order to undertake positive, transformative action.