Suchergebnisse

In the past twenty-five years advances in research have increased awareness of the deleterious effects of criminal sanction to an extent that they are now undeniable from any political or academic viewpoint. The most obvious and immediate unofficial sanction accompanying conviction in a criminal court, social and familial ostracism, has been relegated to the background by application of subcultural theory' and empirical demonstration that a single conviction rarely causes severe and lasting effects on family ties. 2 Meanwhile discrimination against ex-offenders in employment markets, both private3 and public, 4 has been clearly demonstrated in many countries. American writers have documented widely the loss of civil rights and status of ex-offenders5 and while there is good reason for the United States to feel more guilty in respect of such stigmatization - civil disabilities are considerably more prevalent in the U.S.A. than elsewhere in the cpmmon law world - at least one writer has pointed out that their neighbours across the 49th parallel are far from innocent of such derogation of the ex-offender status.6 Old convictions can affect licence applications7 and the contractual,8 testatory9 and immigration capacities 10 of the bearer. While police science has highlighted the prejudice toward known offenders that is prevalent in many police departments sociological theory has demonstrated the danger that a person once 'labelled' a criminal will develop a self-concept which leads to further criminal activity.12 It goes almost without saying that the continued existence of various prejudices in the ex-offender's environment may contribute heavily to this process.

Surprisingly, the discourse on ageism hardly profits from stigma research despite their common denominator—discrimination. The goal of this article is to discuss the stigma concept developed on micro-level interactions and apply it to ageism research on the macro level, i.e. using Round 4 data of the representative international European Social Survey (2008). The data analysis is focused on dominant opinions of the Lithuanian population (N=2002) and usual behavior toward older people, while international comparison is used for interpretation of results. The results show that old age in the Lithuanian society is an "open secret" type of stigma: verbal praise of older people, high assessment of their morals and polite declaration of respect conceal intolerance, disregard and discrimination on the behavioral level. The old age stigma is widespread in Lithuania and stronger than in advanced European countries. Its level is close to discrimination particular to other post-communist and Mediterranean countries.

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century's turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of `advanced marginality' — territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of `place', and the loss of a hinterland — and draws out their implications for the formation of the `precariat' in postindustrial societies.

Öffentlichkeit ist verbunden mit Kontrolle. Kontrolle darüber, ob man sich gesellschaftlich akzeptabel verhält. Die Öffentlichkeit des Strafverfahrens dient hierbei zwar auch der Kontrolle des Prozessablaufs, vielmehr aber der Sichtbarmachung gerade der gesellschaftlichen Verfehlung des Angeklagten. Das Bedürfnis nach dieser Kenntlichmachung beruht anthropologisch bedingt auf dem Vergeltungsgedanken und ist gesellschaftlich nachvollziehbar, weil der Täter mit sozial anerkannten Werten gebrochen hat. Insbesondere Strafrechtsnormen beinhalten soziale Verhaltenserwartungen mit verstärkter Sanktionsbereitschaft. Eine Gesellschaft hat stets bestimmte Vorstellungen darüber, wie sich die in ihr lebenden Menschen zu verhalten haben. Diese Vorstellungen spiegeln sich besonders in den Strafrechtsnormen wieder, stellen also "Richtigkeitsbedingungen der Gemeinschaft" dar. Die so aufgestellten normativen Erwartungen wandeln sich in rechtmäßig gestellte Anforderungen an das Zusammenleben innerhalb der Gemeinschaft, weshalb deviantes Verhalten auch das Ergebnis eines sozialen Definitionsprozesses ist. Denn die Stigmatisierung erfährt der Angeklagte nicht bereits durch sein deviantes Verhalten, sondern vielmehr erst durch deren öffentliche Verkündung. Die Ausgrenzung sozial abweichenden Verhaltens ist insofern ein Instrument zum gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Zusammenhalt. Die Öffentlichkeit des Strafverfahrens wird im heutigen Medien- und Informationszeitalter durch die Massenmedien als "demokratisches Verbindungsorgan" zur Vermittlung von Informationen her- bzw. dargestellt. Den Medien kommt hier die entscheidende Vermittlerposition zu, da sie überhaupt erst den Rahmen der Öffentlichkeit herstellen, in der sich die verschiedenen Kräfte selbst kontrollieren und so in letzter Konsequenz die Kommunikationsfreiheiten aller verwirklichen sollen. Die mediale Darstellung des Strafverfahrens ist mithin Ausdruck des demokratisch begründeten Informationsinteresses der Gemeinschaft. Freilich ist mit den Möglichkeiten des ...

This article treats housing stigmatization as a social process of symbolic ascription, connected to inhabitants, housing form, housing tenure, and/or housing location. Stigmatization research tends to focus on personal stigmatization, or to examine housing only in relation to territorial stigmatization, while housing research tends to focus on health and policy. This article demonstrates that housing stigmatization, which is differentiated from personal stigmatization and territorial stigmatization, is a viable unit of analysis in its own right for stigma research. Seven core elements are identified, showing that housing stigmatization is: (1) relational; (2) contextual; (3) processual; (4) reinforceable; (5) reversible; (6) morally loaded; and (7) treated as contagious. Comprehending the elements of housing stigmatization will benefit destigmatization efforts.

How should we understand stigmatization in policies that force, induce, or nudge people to make healthier choices? Sometimes when health authorities try to alleviate (inequality in) lifestyle diseases by such means, stigmatization is reinforced and additional burdens are imposed on those who are already at a disadvantage. Distinguishing between policies that rely on stigma effects and policies that produce stigma as an unintended side effect, the paper argues that stigmatization is objectionable because it makes people's lives worse, instrumentally as well as non-instrumentally. How stigmatizing a policy is thus partly determines how desirable it is vis-à-vis other policies that might achieve the same end. In order to settle this matter, the paper suggests four evaluative dimensions and brings them to bear on three different types of policy: legal mandates, incentives, and nudges.

The aim of this work was to develop knowledge about and awareness of fatness stigmatization from a systemic perspective. The stigmatization of fat people was located as a social problem in a second-order reality in which human fatness is observed and responded to, in turn providing it with negative meaning. Four separate studies of processes involved in this systemic stigmatization were performed. In study I, the association between weight and psychological distress was investigated. When controlling for an age-gender variable, this association was almost erased, questioning the certainty by which a higher weight in general is approached as a medical issue. In study II, the focus was on stigma internalization where negative and positive responses combined were connected to fat individuals' distress. We found that both responses seemed to have a larger impact on fat individuals, suggesting that the embodied stigma of being fat sensitizes them to responses in general. In study III, justifications of fatness stigmatization was explored by a content analysis of a reality TV weight-loss show. The analysis showed how explicit bullying of a fat partner could be justified by animating the thin Self as violated by the fat Other, thus downplaying the evils of the bullying act in favor of highlighting the ideological value of thinness. The implications of these studies were related and seated in a context comprising a historical aversion toward the fat body, a declared obesity epidemic, a new public health ideology, a documented failure to reverse this obesity epidemic, and a market of weight-loss stakeholders who thrive on keeping the negative meanings of being fat alive. The stigmatization of fat people was intelligible from a systemic perspective, where processes of structural ignorance, internalized self-discrimination, and applied prejudice reinforce each other to form a larger stigmatizing process. In paper IV, it was argued that viewing fatness stigmatization as oppression rather than misrecognition could hold transformative keys to social change. ; There are social groups in society that are categorically connected, for example by their physical, cultural or psychological markers. For political, or moral, reasons, some of these groups seem to trigger special attention in form of forceful response processes at several societal levels. This is the case with the contemporary 'obesity epidemic' phenomenon; postulated by the World Health Organization as one of the most severe threats to the health of future mankind. One of the downsides with such special attention is that the fat individuals find themselves caught up in seemingly unavoidable processes of devaluation. Instead of investigating the catastrophic (well-known) psycho-social consequences of these individuals, this work focuses on connecting the devaluing processes that form a systemic stigmatization of fat individuals. From this critical perspective, it is argued that the pervasive stigmatization of fat people is not an unfortunate consequence of structural norms that passively exclude its 'non-fits', but an intelligible outcome of a highly active set of processes that continuously construct and re-construct a historical aversion towards fat people.