individual subsume the workers, women, and nonwhites who are also persons—even if, admittedly, they were not historically recognized as such? I think the problem here is a failure to appreciate the nature and magnitude of the obstacles to the cognitive rethinking required, and the mistaken move— especially easy for analytic philosophers, used to the effortless manipulation of variables, the shi...

Professionalism is a key concept in the sociologies of work, occupations, professions and organizations. But professionalism is changing and being changed. The article considers the different ways in which professionalism has been and is currently being interpreted. Beginning with a section on defining the field and clarifying concepts, the second section examines the concept of professionalism...

Invited to give the 2000 Rick Turner Memorial Lecture, I pondered the following question: What explains the fact that the sincere thought of a brilliant and heroic person such as Turner can appear preposterous to me, if bad faith or scholarly ignorance on one side or the other are ruled out, as they should be in this case? I address this question by considering what ‘ideologies’ are from the pe...

Almost 40 years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30 and 60% of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences. However, these findings have not been widely accepted or incorporated into the dominant paradigms that explain the etiology of political ideology. This has been attributed in part to meas...

This study is guided by the principle that there is no technology detached from an ideology. This ideology appears in the interfaces conditioning the relationship between people and digital artifacts. This article adopts as theoretical reference the User-Centered Design (UCD). Under the UCD principles it is presented a key to understand how technology is a vehicle of ideological content that af...

THIS ARTICLE MAINTAINS THAT THE CHALLENGE to the American public library is not information technology but the ideology of information technology. This ideology is a coalescence of technological determinism, free market values, and neo-conservative politics that advocates radical government deregulation and the withdrawal of support for public services. In the face of this challenge, the articl...

Frame theory is often credited with "bringing ideas back in" social movement studies, but frames are not the only useful ideational concepts. The older, more politicized concept of ideology needs to be used in its own right and not recast as a frame. Frame theory is rooted in linguistic studies of interaction, and points to the way shared assumptions and meanings shape the interpretation of eve...

Observers of contemporary politics know that Islamic extremism presents ‘the West’ with a serious challenge of national and international security consequent to terrorist events of recent time. In addition to constabulary and military responses, there remains the more fundamental question about how to understand Islamist ideology and how counternarratives might be framed in the interest of law ...

Contact with the dominant group can increase opposition, among the disadvantaged, to social policies that would benefit their group. This effect can be explained in terms of contact promoting support for an ideology of meritocracy, which privileges the distribution of societal resources based on individual merit, rather than group-level disadvantage. We tested this ideological mechanism in a la...