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This paper examines the stratification among African American women by skin color on indices such as education, income, and spousal status. How racial and colonial ideologies situate whiteness and blackness as symbolic representations in relation to one another and the subsequent systems of discrimination that develop from those ideologies is the crux of the theoretical argument in this paper. Infusing the concept of constructed notions of beauty into this racial paradigm further elaborates this process for African American women. I hypothesized that light-skinned women would have higher educational attainment, higher personal incomes and would be more likely to many high-status husbands than would darker-skinned women. Even when controlling for background variables, all three of the hypotheses are confirmed and the significance of skin color, particularly the privileging of lightness, is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the findings from an ethnographic study of childcare. It examines employed mothers and their experiences with sending their young children to childcare centers, and childcare workers and their perspectives on their work. In this 2-year-long research project, I studied two large, urban childcare centers, one independent, non-profit and one part of a national, for-profit chain. Methods included participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and focus groups. I found that mothers' experiences with childcare are shaped by three factors: (1) cultural messages; (2) feelings of anxiety and guilt; and (3) the perceived quality of the childcare. I explore these three factors and discuss how the mothers are affected by the 'intensive mothering' ideology. For the childcare workers, their work is affected by: (1) the level of respect and economic rewards they receive, (2) their commitment to the children, and (3) their role as expert or authority and other issues of power. By examining the two groups of women together, it becomes clear that both groups of women face interwoven challenges in a culture that devalues children and childrearing, and that alliances to address these interwoven concerns are essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between psychological disciplines and inequality has been a subject of great scholarly interest in the last several decades. Most works on the subject analyze macro features of psychological disciplines (mainly their evaluative tools, theoretical assumptions, and disciplinary power) and criticize them as biased against minorities. This paper re-examines the relationship between psychology and inequality from a micro, face-to-face standpoint. Drawing on close observations of 33 placement committees in which professionals from various psychological fields (psychology, social work, school counseling, etc.) discuss children’s eligibility for special education services, it portrays the actual doing of psychology as an inconsistent and malleable endeavor. In contrast to the macro-oriented research on the relationship between psychology and inequality, it shows that in actual face-to-face interactions, professionals use different types of folk concerns that often exchange formal evaluative criteria, theoretical assumptions or professional authority in final placement decisions. By revealing the different folk considerations professionals use to sort and analyze working- versus middle-class parents, this project adds an essential layer to scholarly understanding of the relationship between psychological practice and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an inquiry into how a new truth about sleepiness is being produced in a society increasingly organized around the primacy of expertise and its representation in print and visual media. Sleepiness originally described a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep. Increasingly, however, a new and disturbing meaning of somnolence is found in a juncture of medical and epidemiological research, social movements, and popular culture. Alongside the idea that sleepiness is a tranquil promise of repose is another, emerging truth. Sleepiness, we are told, is hazardous to self and others, and, importantly, it is each person's responsibility to resist this seductive call of the body. How, we ask, is a private, routinely occurring state of partial consciousness deprivatized, linked to public health vernaculars, and transformed into a reprobate condition? This alternative, disturbing truth about sleepiness is shown to be emerging from several disparate, seemingly unrelated caches of scientific studies, social movement literatures, magazines and newspapers, and web sites. The ideas of Michel Foucault, who pioneered the contemporary study of discourse, are shown to be particularly apropos to this inquiry, though not without some modification to make them more amenable to a contemporary society shaped increasingly by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines membership and participation in neighborhood improvement associations. Individual-level and contextual-level structural variables associated with the community of limited liability model are important for the decision to join associations but not to participate in them. Also, social ties in the community are more important than psychological attachment for both membership and participation. However, neither social ties nor attachment serve as intervening variables in the relationship between structural variables and membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author arranges some of the major treatments of alienation within a coherent framework. He introduces a distinction between disassociation (certain specified objective conditions) and alienation (a specified experience) and articulates the relationship between these two by presenting a series of intervening psychological issues. A typology of human association is presented, and it is argued that especially two types of disassociation (i.e., marginality and subordination) and, to some extent, another (i.e., privilege) may be productive of alienation These conditions are considered at the cultural, social, and psychological levels of analysis. Variables connecting these conditions and alienation include the perception of the condition, evaluation, integration, blame, and response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on culture identity and dress. The sociology of dress is a vibrant field, exploring intriguing theoretical, methodological, and empirical domains. During the mid-twentieth century, clothing scholars began investigating the sociological and psychological implications of dress and appearance. In 1989, a group met to discuss the direction of the analysis of dress. The published papers from that meeting considered a wide range of topics, including identity, social psychology, cultural anthropology and sociology, semiotics, affect and cognition, social construction of gender, literary analysis, as well as qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Recent textbooks in the area continue to thaw from sociology and other fields to refine theories of dress and human behavior. Related to the misperception that dress only applies to the psychology of the self is the notion that dress is trivial both substantively and theoretically. Perhaps sociologists' neglect of dress might also be linked to a misperception that it is nonrational behavior similar to other actions that do not lend themselves to systematic analysis. Again these articles provide a contrasting view. In organizational and institutional settings, such as greedy organizations, total institutions, and mass media, dress and all it symbolizes are debated and discussed in ways that can be studied scientifically. Further, all of the articles have identified patterns in how dress is used in identity embracing and distancing that can be incorporated into broader theoretical frameworks.