The Conceptual Practices Of Power

Sociologists generate idology instead of knowledge - particularly where women are concerned. By starting with the theoretical formulations of their discipline and then interpreting people's activities as expressions of those ideas, sociologists both participate in and perpetuate society's traditional power relations. So argues Dorothy E. Smith in this provocative study of her own discipline and its relationship to women's lives. While acknowledging that social science is ideological, Smith argues that for sociologists idology affects methods of inquiry and transforms what actually happens in people's lives into a formalized picture that lacks subjectiveness. She explicates the need for an alternative sociology that better explores everyday experience, suggesting a Marxist materialist ideology, and emphasizing that ideology is not content but practice. Smith is especially concerned with the application of sociological ideology to the human service bureaucracy and the way institutions of mental health reconstruct women's lives. She provides meticulous accounts of the ways in with police reports, governments statistics, hospital records, and psychiatric files and ideologically interpreted, transforming a person's life history in the process. In a reveatory chapter on biographer Quentin Bell's exploration of Virginia Woolf's suicide, Smith demonstrates once again how the professional who claims to report an event acurrately also shapes it. Highly critical of current sociological practice, she also hopes that alternative appraoches will change the discipline.

Beginning with women's experience, the author examines the field's actual practices of reasoning and conceptualization. She argues that standard sociological methods of inquiry make use of ideological practices, transforming the actualities of people's lives into a formalized picture lacking subjects and subjectivity. The method of Smith recommends anchors a Marxist materialism, based in people's activities, to a woman's stand-point based in experience. She uses this method in a radically original way to explore ideology and objectified knowledge as the conceptual practices of ruling. Smith is equally concerned with the application of sociological ideology to the human service bureacracy and the way institutions of mental health reconstruct women's lives. She provides meticulous accounts of the ways in which police reports, government statistics, hospital records, and pschiatric files are ideologically interpreted, transforming a person's life history in the process. In a revelatory chapter on the biographer Quentin Bell's account of Virginia Woolf's suicide, the author demonstrates how the text implicates the reader in the objectification of Woolf's "psychiatric problems." Highly critical of current sociological practices, The Conceptual Practices of Power both recommends and exemplifies the alternative approach that Smith presented in her earlier work, That Everyday World as Problematic, also published by Northeastern University Press.

Rather than view social inequality as a problem for marginalized populations, Power and Everyday Practices turns the spotlight on the ways power and privilege are produced and reproduced in our everyday worlds

Embodied Power explores dimensions of politics seldom addressed in political science, illuminating state practices that produce hierarchically-organized groups through racialized gendering—despite guarantees of formal equality. Challenging disembodied accounts of citizenship, the book traces how modern science and law produce race, gender, and sexuality as purportedly natural characteristics, masking their political genesis. Taking the United States as a case study, Hawkesworth demonstrates how diverse laws and policies concerning civil and political rights, education, housing, and welfare, immigration and securitization, policing and criminal justice create finely honed hierarchies of difference that structure the life prospects of men and women of particular races and ethnicities within and across borders. In addition to documenting the continuing operation of embodied power across diverse policy terrains, the book investigates complex ways of seeing that render raced-gendered relations of domination and subordination invisible. From common assumptions about individualism and colorblind perception to disciplinary norms such as methodological individualism, methodological nationalism, and abstract universalism, problematic presuppositions sustain mistaken notions concerning formal equality and legal neutrality that allow state practices of racialized gendering to escape detection with profound consequences for the life prospects of privileged and marginalized groups. Through sustained critique of these flawed suppositions, Embodied Power challenges central beliefs about the nature of power, the scope of state action, and the practice of liberal democracy and identifies alternative theoretical frameworks that make racialized-gendering visible and actionable. Key Features: Demonstrates how understandings of politics change when the experiences of men and women of diverse classes, races, and ethnicities are placed at the center of analysis. Explains why race-neutral and gender-neutral policies fail to eliminate entrenched inequalities. Shows how accredited methods in political science (and the social sciences more generally) mask state practices that create and sustain racial and gender inequality. Traces how mistaken notions of biological determinism have diverted attention from political processes of racialization, gendering, and sexualization. Argues that the intersecting categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality are essential to all subfields of political science if contemporary power is to be studied systematically.

This collection brings together the indispensable secondary literature. It includes a major introduction which explains why power is a key concept and guides the reader through the contrasting attempts to understand it.

Inquires into the role of the unexpected in world politics by examining the protean power effects of agile innovation and improvisation.

The supplemented edition of this important reader includes a substantive new introduction by the author on the changing nature of feminist methodology. It takes into account the implications of a major new study included for this first time in this book on poverty and gender (in)equality, and it includes an article discussing the ways in which this study was conducted using the research methods put forward by the first edition. This article begins by explaining why a new and better poverty metric is needed and why developing such a metric requires an alternative methodological approach inspired by feminism. Feminist research is a growing tradition of inquiry that aims to produce knowledge not biased by inequitable assumptions about gender and related categories such as class, race, religion, sexuality, and nationality."Just Methods" is designed for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in a range of disciplines. Rather than being concerned with particular techniques of inquiry, the interdisciplinary readings in this book address broad questions of research methodology. They are designed to help researchers think critically and constructively about the epistemological and ethical implications of various approaches to research selection and research design, evidence-gathering techniques, and publication of results.A key theme running through the readings is the complex interrelationship between social power and inequality on the one hand and the production of knowledge on the other. A second and related theme is the inseparability of research projects and methodologies from ethical and political values."

Provides a conceptualisation of citizen journalism as a political practice developed through analyses of an historical and postcolonial case.