...essay will examine French social theorist Michel Foucault’s (1926-1984), concept of Panopticism. It will give an example of the way it can be observed, through contemporary society. Firstly, it will cover a general aspect of Foucault’s work, regarding his historical method and his understanding of madness, power, knowledge and the body. It will discuss the idea of the Panopticon and how it shaped the idea of discipline and power. Furthermore, it will examine one element of Foucault’s theory, and how it could be applied in contemporary society, through the subject of security in public places. Foucault’s 1964 work Madness and Civilisation, studied the evolution of madness from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, showing the evolving change of how madness was perceived over time in society. During the time of the Renaissance, Foucault found that people who were ‘mad’ were seen as liberated (Foucault 1967). However, the classical age in the seventeenth century created ‘enormous houses of confinement’ which reduced madness to silence (Foucault 1967:35). The mid seventeenth century saw madness associated with confinement. These institutions housed people who were poor, unemployed, prisoners and insane. In 1656, the ‘Hôpital Général’ was founded in Paris and could be seen from the start, that it was not a ‘medical establishment’, but rather a sort of ‘semi-judicial structure’ (Foucault 1967:37). It had absolute power and control over its occupants, and anyone that was considered...
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...Throughout Foucault’s reading he talks about punitive justice in two different ways. Although he talks about the differences in the punitive system in history and where it is today he does not seem to say that one is better than the other. In history he talks about how the prisoners were executed or punished in front of the whole community. The punishments were meant to inflict the most pain possible on the prisoner and show the community what would happen to those who disobey the laws. There was no mercy shown on these people and the body was so important. The body should experience the same amount of pain or more depending on what the crime was. Things have changed in today’s punitive system. In today’s system the death penalty is still...
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...Some realists would argue that the punishment of offenders is designed to carry out a number of purposes. First, giving the victim, or the victim’s family a sense of justice from the criminal justice system, and to maintain social solidarity, showing that crime is not tolerated and via this, most forms of deviance. Realists believe that crime is a real thing and that official statistics should be taken at face value, as such they call for tougher sentences to be given for more severe crimes, for example, taking a life receives a higher sentence than using a drug. Right Realists would argue that the system works as a form of deterrent and that with target hardening, the deterrence of prisons and other punishments will take precedence in the mind of a person considering their options, in accordance with the Rational Choice theory. A person will weigh up cost versus gain, and if they believe that the gain outweighs the cost, they will commit an act of deviance. They also believe biological differences are responsible for crime and deviance through studies which show criminals to have a lower intelligence and to just be acting on instinct. However; they’re criticised for contradicting themselves in that in one circumstance they believe people are biologically predisposed to commit crime, and then saying that they have free will and are rationally deciding what to do. They’re also criticised in that in studies of criminal IQs, there’s only ever been, at best, a 4% drop in IQ against...
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...Some realists would argue that the punishment of offenders is designed to carry out a number of purposes. First, giving the victim, or the victims family (indirect victims) a sense of justice from the criminal justice system, and to maintain social solidarity, showing that crime is not tolerated and via this, most forms of deviance. Realists believe that crime is a real thing and that official statistics should be taken at face value, as such they call for tougher sentences to be given for more severe crimes, for example, taking a life receives a higher sentence than using a class C drug. Right Realists would argue that the system works as a form of deterrent and that with target hardening, the deterrence of prisons and other punishments will take precedence in the mind of a person considering their options, in accordance with the Rational Choice theory. A person will weigh up cost versus gain, and if they believe that the gain outweighs the cost, they will commit an act of deviance. They also believe biological differences are responsible for crime and deviance through studies which show criminals to have a lower intelligence and to just be acting on instinct. However; They’re criticised for contradicting themselves in that in one circumstance they believe people are biologically predisposed to commit crime, and then saying that they have free will and are rationally deciding what to do. They’re also criticised in that in studies of criminal IQs, there’s only ever been, at best...
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...Empowerment and Community Planning Chapter 1 Theories of Power A Survey Towards the Development of a Theory of Power Before beginning the discussion of empowerment and the development of a theory connected with it, I want to deal with a concept that is prior to empowerment—power. Power is a key concept for an understanding of processes of empowerment. The theory of empowerment that will be developed further on will draw its inspiration from an integration of two domains: from an understanding of theories of power and the use of insights drawn from these for the purposes of developing a theory of empowerment, and from an analysis of processes of empowerment. Hence, this deeper study of it will also make possible a better understanding of states of powerlessness, practices of disempowerment, and processes by which people and communities struggle for control over their lives and environments. A Brief History of Theories of Power This chapter makes no pretension to survey all the existing literature in the field of the theories of power. It begins with a historical survey of thought about power in the social sciences, relating only to the most prominent theories. Further on, a number of theories that contain elements suitable to the development of a theory of empowerment are presented in more detail. Modern thinking about power begins in the writings of Nicollò Machiavelli (The Prince, early 16th century) and Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, mid-17th century). Their books are...
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...Juvenile Justice: A Lost Child in a Failed System I remember one day when I was a child, I was about four years old and my sister was about 10 years old. We were on vacation with our parents in a beautiful resort. Our room was on the 15th floor of the Sea Coast Towers. Before I continue the story I have to make clear, my sister and have always been very close; we were inseparable. Until we read about Christian Fernandez, this story used to be a family joke. I had fallen asleep and my parents were going to take that opportunity to have a quick cocktail at the bar. Apparently I had woken up and began to cry uncontrollably. My sister did her best to try and get me to stop, but how do you stop a cry baby from crying? My sister remembers stepping out to the balcony because of her frustration and looking down; she says that in her head she was telling herself that it was not a long a fall and that I was so chunky that I would bounce. Thank goodness my parents came back to the room before she could entertain her thoughts! I first learned about Christian Fernandez about nine months ago. I was browsing through my AOL news when I saw the headline “Florida Boy to Be Charged as an Adult”. It immediately caught my attention. I began to read the story of a 12 year old boy, Fernandez who was left taking care of his 5 year old brother and his two year old brother. Fernandez pushed his two- year- old brother into a book shelf twice, knocking the toddler unconscious. When...
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...® Acodemy of Management Heview 1993, Vol. 18, No. 3. 518-545. FOUCAULT. POWER/KNOWLEDGE. AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT BARBARA TOWNLEY The University of Alberta Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault. I argue that human resource management (HRM) may be best understood as a discourse and set of practices that attempt to reduce the indeterminacy involved in the employment contract. Here I reread HRM practices from a Foucauldian power-knowledge perspective and suggest that this provides an avenue to reorient contemporary, historical, and comparative analyses of the area. A glimpse at human resource management (HRM) texts would seem to give light to a comment by Beer, Spector, Lawrence, Mills, and Walton (1984) that HRM is a series of seemingly disjointed activities. This notion echoes an earlier view of Baldamus (1961: 347) that what is encompassed by HRM's subject matter is "anything from supervision, incentives and profit sharing to machine-paced production, methods of training and employee selection." Often this heterogeneity is excused in terms of HRM's reflecting the ad hoc and reactive nature of its origins (Jacoby, 1985; Niven, 1967; Ozanne, 1967). What the heterogeneity of HRM highlights, however, is the importance of an organizing principle, or analytical focus, as opposed to common sense description, which gives HRM practices a theoretical coherence. HRM's heterogeneity stresses the importance of an order "that turns a set of bits, which have limited...
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...In the ocean exists an ancient god Cthulhu, sleeping in his stone house in R’yleh under the sea. He sleeps and telepathically invades our dreams, turning them into nightmares. There is a cult that follows the ancient god, and they relate the details of this ancient being and his intentions: The HP Lovecraft Wiki 2014 [“Cthulhu,” at http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Cthulhu] The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu in "The Tale of Cthulhu" are based on statues of the creature. One, constructed by an artist after a series of baleful dreams, is said to have "yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature [...] A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings."[6] Another, recovered by police from a raid on a murderous cult, "represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."[7] When the creature finally appears, the story says that the "thing cannot be described," but it is called "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", with "flabby claws" and an "awful squid-head with writhing feelers." Johansen's phrase "a mountain walked or stumbled" gives a sense of the creature's scale[8] (this is corroborated by Wilcox's dreams, which "touched wildly on a gigantic thing 'miles high' which walked or lumbered about"). Cthulhu is depicted as having a worldwide...
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...describe the underlying structure of real networks,”1 rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as a nonhierarchical interconnectedness that structures our contemporary world and means of communication. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other hand, argue that the Internet is an exemplar of the rhizome: a nonhierarchical, noncentered network—a democratic network with “an indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes [that] communicate with no central point of control.”2 Our journey begins with early modernism, and if early modernism had a theme, it was oneness. This focus on oneness or unity, on the whole rather than on individual parts, What is at stake in settling this dispute? Being. And, knowledge and power in that being. More specifically, this paper explores how a theory of social ontology has evolved to theories of social ontologies, how the modernist notion of global understanding of individuals working toward a common (rationalized and objectively knowable) goal became pluralistic postmodern theories embracing the idea of local networks. Furthermore, what this summary journey of theoretical evolution allows for is a consideration of why understandings of a world comprising emergent networks need be of concern to composition instructors and their practical activities in the classroom: networks produce knowledge. 1. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press...
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...Findings and Interpretation 31 Identity Formation 35 Conclusion 38 Literature 41 Media 43 Introduction The Walt Disney Company’s cultural products have been a great influence on popular culture since the 1930s and an inspiration for generations all over the world ever since. For many, including myself, the Princes, Princesses and fantastical creatures of Disney’s animated fairy tales have become symbols of their youth. Seeing the films gives rise to a feeling of nostalgia, they become a memento of one’s childhood world. But what kind of world is this? What kind of realities do Disney’s fantastical representations construct? In my thesis, I will analyze a specific element of Disney films: gender roles constructed through the representation of femininity in their animated features. I will study how this representation changes over time: has Disney’s highly criticized construction of gender roles changed over time, and if so, what realities do contemporary Disney discourses construct? I propose to research how femininity is represented in Walt Disney‘s animated features, how this representation changes over time and what kind of effects this has on the...
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...In Social Learning Theory, human behaviour is explained in terms of a three-way, dynamic, reciprocal theory in which personal factors, environmental influences, and behavior continually interact. A basic premise of Social Learning Theory is that people learn not only through their own experiences, but also by observing the actions of others and the results of those actions. In the 1970s, Albert Bandura published a comprehensive framework for understanding human behaviour, based on a cognitive formulation which he named the Social Cognitive Theory. That framework is currently the dominant version used in health behaviour and health promotion; however, it is still often referred to as Social Learning Theory. The impetus for this special issue on HIV came from a discussion a few years ago during which we established a shared interest in a revival of the sort of scholarly innovation that characterized the early years of the HIV epidemic. As far back as the early 1980s, social theorists, cultural, critics, artists and others created a vibrant body of work on HIV/AIDS. Working from various theoretical and disciplinary sites they steadfastly emphasized the ‘social’ for understanding the significance of AIDS and opened up new avenues for critiquing and re-imagining scientific, cultural and social responses to infectious disease. At its best, this work served also as an impetus for queer theory, various feminist critiques and a range of research under the rubric of science, medicine...
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...Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism Introduction A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. These different lenses allow critics to consider works of art based on certain assumptions within that school of theory. The different lenses also allow critics to focus on particular aspects of a work they consider important. For example, if a critic is working with certain Marxist theories, s/he might focus on how the characters in a story interact based on their economic situation. If a critic is working with post-colonial theories, s/he might consider the same story but look at how characters from colonial powers (Britain, France, and even America) treat characters from, say, Africa or the Caribbean. Hopefully, after reading through and working with the resources in this area of the OWL, literary theory will become a little easier to understand and use. Disclaimer Please note that the schools of literary criticism and their explanations included here are by no means the only ways of distinguishing these separate areas of theory. Indeed, many critics use tools from two or more schools in their work. Some would define differently or greatly expand the (very) general statements given here. Our explanations are meant only as starting places for your own investigation into literary theory. We encourage you to use the list of scholars and works provided for each...
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...http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations (this article cites 30 articles hosted on the SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms): http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/34/1/51 Downloaded from http://crs.sagepub.com at LA TROBE UNIVERSITY on April 21, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Critical Sociology 34(1) 51-79 http://crs.sagepub.com Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee University of Western Sydney, Australia Abstract In this article I critically analyze contemporary discourses of corporate social responsibility and related discourses of sustainability and corporate citizenship. I argue that despite their emancipatory rhetoric, discourses of corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability are defined by narrow business interests and serve to curtail interests of external stakeholders. I provide an alternate perspective, one that views discourses of corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability as ideological movements that are intended to legitimize and consolidate the power of large corporations. I also problematize the popular notion of organizational ‘stakeholders’. I...
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...Myth and Scripture resources for Biblical Study Susan ackerman, Old testament/hebrew Bible editor number 78 Myth and Scripture conteMporary perSpectiveS on religion, language, and iMagination Edited by dexter e. callender Jr. SBl press atlanta copyright © 2014 by SBl press all rights reserved. no part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by means of any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 copyright act or in writing from the publisher. requests for permission should be addressed in writing to the rights and permissions office, Society of Biblical literature, 825 houston Mill road, atlanta, ga 30329 uSa. library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Myth and scripture : contemporary perspectives on religion, language, and imagination / Dexter E. Callender, Jr., editor. p. cm. — (Society of Biblical literature resources for biblical study ; number 78) includes bibliographical references and index. iSBn 978-1-58983-961-8 (paper binding : alk. paper) — iSBn 978-1-58983-962-5 (electronic format) — iSBn 978-1-58983-963-2 (hardcover binding : alk. paper) 1. Myth in the Bible. 2. Bible. old testament—criticism, interpretation, etc. i. callender, dexter e., 1962– editor of compilation. ii. callender, dexter e., 1962– author. Myth and Scripture : dissonance and convergence.. BS520.5.M98 2014 220.6'8—dc23 2014002897...
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...CHRISTIAN ETHICS IN A POSTMODERN WORLD The Rise of Postmodernity Since Federico de Onis’s use of the term ‘postmodernismo’ to describe the Spanish and Latin-American poetry of 1905-1914 which had reacted against the ‘excess’ of modernism in 1934, (Rose 1991: 171) “Postmodernism” became very popular. It has been used in the fields of art (Christo-Bakargiev 1987), architecture (Pevsner 1967), literature (Hassan 1971), video, economics, films (James 1991), ideology (Larrain 1994: 90-118), theology (Tilley at al 1995), and philosophy (Griffin et al 1993). In trying to understand ‘postmodern’, we have to understand ‘modern’ first. According to Rose (1991: 1), there are many related yet different meanings associated with the term ‘modern’. First of all, Arnold J. Toynbee understands modern as referring to the historical phenomenon of The most significant of the conclusions that suggest themselves is that the word ‘modern’ in the term ‘Modern Western Civilization’, can, without inaccuracy, be given a more precise and concrete connotation by being translated ‘middle class’. Western communities became ‘modern’ in the accepted Modern Western meaning of the word, just as soon as they had succeeded in producing a bourgeoisie that was both numerous enough and competent enough to become the predominant element in society. We think of the new chapter of Western history that opened at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as being ‘modern’ par excellence because...
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