Suchergebnisse

This book draws on the South African experience to develop a theory of race trouble with the central observation that transformation in South Africa has reshaped patterns and practices of encounter and exchange between historically defined race groups. Race continues to feature prominently in these new forms of social interaction and, by participating in them, South Africans are cast once again as racial subjects - advantaged or disadvantaged, included or excluded, colonizers or colonized.

The historical development of the four main theories which have attempted to explain the relationship between cognitive style and ideological content—i.e., authoritarianism, extremism theory, context theory, and value pluralism theory—is analyzed from a rhetorical perspective. The discussion focuses on the manner in which the tensions between theoretical universalism and political critique have been "resolved" by theorists working in different historico‐political contexts. While both these scientific and political values have been of central concern in theorizing the link between cognitive style and content, they are deeply incompatible because it is not possible to establish a fixed relationship between a personality dimension and the changing beliefs associated with different ideologies across time and place. This has prompted theorists aiming for universalistic accounts to define ideological orientation in terms of psychological processes rather than content, which, in turn, has compromised the critical potential of their theory. The paper concludes that the historical development of the literature may be understood in terms of dilemmatic counter‐themes which, under different political circumstances, have been resolved in novel ways.

Bibliography: leaves 240-257. ; This thesis proposes to answer a single question: do the stylistic features of cognition operate independently of cognitive contents? The question itself has a history, and the way it has been framed, and the types of answers it has attracted have been related to ideological and political interests. Chapter 1 reviews four social psychological theories of the relationship between cognitive style and ideological beliefs - authoritarianism, extremism theory, context theory, and value pluralism theory. It argues that these (empiricist) accounts have been bedeviled by a tension between theoretical universalism and political critique, and have fostered the view that cognitive traits are stable, general, and pervasive properties of individual psychology. Chapter 2 focuses on the construct of intolerance of ambiguity, and shows how - in the manner of Danziger's (1985) "methodological circle" - universalistic assumptions have become incorporated into measurement instruments; and how all evidence of individual variability in cognitive style has been accommodated by interactionist models of personality, leaving the empiricist view intact. Roy Bhaskar's critical realism is used as an alternative to a empiricist psychology, and Michael Billig's rhetorical psychology is used as an alternative to universalistic theories of cognitive style. A measurement procedure is developed which can assess cross-content variability in ambiguity tolerance. Three studies are performed in order to justify a move towards an anti-universalistic conception of cognitive style. Study l evaluates the hypothesized generality of ambiguity tolerance on a sample of university students. Factor analysis and correlational matrices show that ambiguity tolerance toward different authorities is domain specific, and that different factors are related to each other positively, negatively, and orthogonally. Study 2 employs the same sample, and uses polynomial regression analysis to show that the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and ideological conservatism is highly variable across content domain. Study 3 replicates these central findings with another student sample and with different scale contents. The results of all three studies arc contrary to the predictions of the social psychological accounts of cognitive style. They show that expressions of cognitive style are context- and content-dependent, and suggest that the empiricist "thing-like" ontology be replaced with a praxis- and concept-dependent ontology.

The political and legislative changes which took place in South Africa during the 1990s, with the dissolution of apartheid, created a unique set of social conditions. As official policies of segregation were abolished, people of both black and white racial groups began to experience new forms of social contact and intimacy. By examining these emerging processes of intergroup contact in South Africa, and evaluating related evidence from the US, Racial Encounter offers a social psychological account of desegregation. It begins with a critical analysis of the traditional theories and research mod

The white wedding is a traditional ritual, governed by heteronormative conventions, which (re)produces stereotypical and patriarchal gender norms. In this study 10 white, South African, middle-class, heterosexual, newlywed couples were interviewed about their wedding ceremonies. The interviews were analysed using Parker's (2005) framework for discourse analytic reading. This helped us analyse two related discourses, the "fairy-tale" and "bride's day" discourse that allowed couples to justify gender unequal practices. The findings suggest that wedding discourses encourage (1) the objectification of women and their treatment in a benevolently sexist manner, (2) the unequal distribution of wedding labour between the bride and groom and, ultimately, (3) the perpetuation of women's subordination in heterosexual relationships. Participating in the rituals of the white wedding maintains taken-for-granted heteronormative discourses that undermine gender equality and, ultimately, women's emancipation.

This article presents a discursive analysis of participant accounts of authoritarianism, with the aim of understanding how participants construct accounts about authority, when, and for what purposes. Participants completed a 30-item Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale and were then interviewed about how they went about this task. Analyses revealed that, despite an overall consistency when answering items on an authoritarianism scale, participants in this study did not consistently choose to produce authoritarian responses in contrast to the nonauthoritarian alternative. Instead, the construction and expression of authoritarian ideas was found to be directly related to two rhetorical features of conversing about authoritarianism: (1) the ideological dilemma of society versus individual and (2) the mobilization of arguments about social and personal threat that allowed participants to construct accounts about collective rights or personal freedoms. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current debates about how authoritarianism should be theorized and studied. Adapted from the source document.

In spite of the removal of legislated racial segregation, a number of observational studies in South Africa and elsewhere have shown that "informal," nonlegislated segregation persists in spaces of everyday interaction. Most of these have been case studies of segregation at single sites. The authors seek to quantify segregation in a sample of sites, in order to develop models of the factors that predict segregation. To this end, the authors use photographs of 67 first-year university classes, taken during the first 2 weeks of the semester, and then again during the last 2 weeks of the semester. Segregation is analyzed using Campbell and colleagues' measure of seating adjacencies. Across the classrooms, segregation correlates with class size, venue size, and class density, and results show higher levels of segregation in the second observation in comparison with the first. The authors conclude that interracial contact at university does not lead to the formation of cross-race friendships and consider a number of ergonomic factors that affect segregation.

The aim of this article is to show that tensions between conflicting accounts of masculinity need not only be 'resolved' by individual men, but can have a collective 'resolution'. We argue that the 'real man' - by drawing together the 'macho' and 'new man' discourses - represents one such 'integrated' discourse of masculinity available to men. Our argument is based on a discourse analysis of 15 editions of Men's Health, a South African magazine predominantly aimed at white, middle- to upper-middle class, heterosexual men. We also investigate how such integrated discourses may be collectively produced, arguing that the 'real man' is the product of a rhetorical question-answer strategy that moves men from ignorance to knowledge. Focusing on the rhetoric of masculine ignorance, we argue that the knowledge produced in answer to this ignorance serves to 'resolve' a current dilemma for men: how to maintain an essential masculinity while distancing oneself from criticisms of men as traditionally macho. We conclude by exploring, from a feminist perspective, the political implications of the 'real man' discourse as a collective 'resolution'.