Theory and Society 44(2)

Theory and Society, March 2015: Volume 44, Issue 2

Protecting citizens in hard times: citizenship and repatriation pressures in the United States and France during the 1930s
Matthew J. Baltz

Economic crises have historically left immigrants vulnerable due to their insecure positions in the labor market and tenuous social and political ties to host country populations. During the Great Depression, citizenship status also emerged as a key factor determining the rights and protections offered to foreign-born populations in the two main receiving states of the interwar period: the United States and France. This article investigates the ways in which citizenship began to intrude into areas of social and political life where it previously held little relevance. To explain this phenomenon, it draws upon and supplements theories on the relationship between the formation of states and the making of modern national communities, focusing on the expanding powers of nation states within and across international borders after World War I. In both France and the United States, there were notable expansions in their power to control migration and fund social assistance programs. Similarly, sending states were also expanding their power to provide “remote protections” for their citizens abroad through bilateral labor treaties or expanded consular support. As states began to do more things with greater capacity, new and firmer boundaries were forged between citizens and noncitizens as well as between sending and receiving states. A key consequence of this was unprecedented pressure to repatriate. Contrary to much of the previous scholarship on this subject, this article stresses the evolving powers of both sending and receiving states and the corresponding elevation of citizenship status as key enablers of repatriation.

Conceptualizing “unrecognized cultural currency”: Bourdieu and everyday resistance among the dominated
Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is important for understanding the cultural processes of domination but less helpful in understanding the agency and creativity of the dominated. This article develops the concept of “unrecognized cultural currency” (UCC) to theorize how certain cultural competencies specific to the dominated can facilitate in their everyday resistance. I theorize UCC as cultural resources that have little symbolic value but that nonetheless may be used by the dominated to acquire other valuable resources and push back, to some extent, forces of domination. A case study of low-income LEP (limited English proficiency) immigrant patients concretizes this theoretical argument, highlighting the contrast between practices of “covert maneuvering,” which are enabled by UCC, and practices of “passivity or withdrawal,” which characterize most patient behaviors in situations where UCC is unavailable. The concept of UCC supplements Bourdieu’s framework of cultural capital with further explanations for intra-class stratification among dominated groups. Meanwhile, this article also helps advance recent discussions about everyday resistance.

Choosing health: embodied neoliberalism, postfeminism, and the “do-diet”
Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated how women are constrained through dieting discourse. Today’s scholars wrestle with similar themes, but confront a thornier question: how do we make sense of a food discourse that frames food choices through a lens of empowerment and health, rather than vanity and restriction? This article addresses this question, drawing from interviews and focus groups with women (N = 100), as well as health-focused food writing. These data allow us to document a postfeminist food discourse that we term the do-diet. The do-diet reframes dietary restrictions as positive choices, while maintaining an emphasis on body discipline, expert knowledge, and self-control. Our analysis demonstrates how the do-diet remediates a tension at the heart of neoliberal consumer culture: namely, the tension between embodying discipline through dietary control and expressing freedom through consumer choice. With respect to theory, our analysis demonstrates how the embodied dimensions of neoliberalism find gendered expression through postfeminism. We conclude that the do-diet heightens the challenge of developing feminist critiques of gendered body ideals and corporeal surveillance, as it promises a way of eating that is both morally responsible and personally empowering.

Gifts, donations, and loose coupling: responses to changes in academic entrepreneurship among bioscientists in Japan
Nahoko Kameo

This article delineates how local actors accomplish the adaptation of a global structure and how the social relations in which actors are embedded affect their negotiation of new practices. Specifically, the article draws on interviews and archival research to examine legal and institutional change regarding academic entrepreneurship in Japanese bioscience. In the late 1990s, Japan began to imitate the United States’ method of promoting academic entrepreneurship. New legislation regulating university-industry ties constrained and even prohibited university scientists’ previous practices of informal collaboration with firms. This article shows how Japanese scientists reappropriated the new rules to continue working with firms in ways that would keep established relationships and work arrangements intact. Previously, Japanese scientists maintained informal, trust-based relationships with firms: scientists received “donations” from firms and, in return, provided the “favor” of intellectual property rights. After the introduction of formal rules, scientists tried to avoid breaching their gift-exchange-like relationships with collaborating firms by neglecting, partially following, or working around the new rules to keep giving favors to firms. By tracing the ways Japanese bio-scientists worked around the new system, I thus show how the social ties and practices that local actors are embedded in affect how they think about their work and their relationships: how previous practices and relationships “pull” loosely-coupled practices.