These books are both different. You may be surprised to learn that neither of the books require (or even advise) total abstinence from alcohol, and both strip out the heavy duty demonization and moralization that often goes a long with this disease (like you are someone weak and deficient because you are an alcoholic). Instead they advise, in an open and sensible manner free of the prohibition like frenzy that often surrounds this social problem, change in diet, lifestyle, and attention to whatever social or emotional pathologies may encourage addictive behavior. Recognizing that alcohol, like other addictive substances, provides an endorphin rush (i.e. they make your brain feel good), the books develop treatment strategies that deal with that. Treatment  involves a pharmacological intervention that interferes with the uptake of endorphins in the brain (thus robbing you of the feel good properties of alcohol) and dramatically reducing craving over time. The book authors claim success rates as high as 80% which is incredible considering how difficult addictions are to treat. I haven’t seen these treatments in action yet, though I do have a client who I’m hoping will try them out. They do, however, seem highly promising, and they are backed by serious scientific research.

alchohol treatment

Now as a sociologist I usually don’t buy into biological or genetic explanations of anything.  For me traditional psychology has too narrow a focus and it misses a lot of key causal factors when it approaches psychological dysfunction. I understand the power that advertising, the media, and our social groups have to determine our behavior and personality so from my sociologically sophisticated perspective, even something as “genetic” as IQ isn’t really genetic at all, but social. Still, what I found most interesting about the books from a sociological point of view was the emphasis on the relationship between alcohol and endorphins, a biological process.  Endorphins of course are the natural “feel good” drugs in your brain. Similar to morphine, the body releases endorphins in responses to both positive and negative stimuli.  Stress and pain cause endorphin release, but also laughter and orgasm. In addition, long distance running has long been associated with endorphin release (the so called “runner’s high”). Endorphins are the body’s “feel good” system and lack of endorphins may lead to depression. Drinking alcohol is a way to encourage endorphin release in the brain.

But why do you need alcohol to encourage endorphin release if it is released by other activities?

So what are you going to do about this? Well, if there is an addiction present the implications are clear, you have to break the chemical association and change your environment so your body is not so overwhelmed that it needs additional medication. We now know how to break the chemical association in the brain (both books reviewed here provide a solution). The harder part is cleaning up our social environments; but at least now you know where to start looking.

Now ending family violence is a laudable goal, I won’t argue with that. Who doesn’t want to end family violence? But I have to admit, things like that, things that say “all women” or “only women” or, for that matter, “only men” or “you can’t come because you’ve got a penis or vagina” or “there’s something wrong because you belong to “that” group of people’ always make me a bit nervous…

Oh, who am I kidding, things like that make me really nervous ’cause typically when you see that sort of exclusion you’re not getting whole picture. Typically, when you start pointing the finger at specific demographic categories you’re expressing some kind of blind spot or bias. If I point to Jewish people and say they are all “like this” or they are all “like that,” I’m being a bigoted racist. But the same doesn’t apply to gender, does it? We regularly point the finger at one gender or another and say “oh they are like this” or “they are like that.”

So what does gender bigotry have to do with this all women campaign?

Well when I read the pamphlet I asked myself the question, where are the men in this campaign to stop violence? Don’t they count? Aren’t they concerned? Why aren’t they included? The answer to that is easy and it pops to mind without any thought or effort at all. Men are the perpetrators of family violence, aren’t they? Men are the ones who act violently, who take up the knives, who shoot the guns and blow up the houses. Men are the perps. and women and children are the victims. It is not overly stated in the pamphlet, but it is certainly the common perception. Ask anybody and they’ll tell you, men are the problem and women and children are the victims.

But is that true?

Must “all women” stand against the violence perpetrated by “all men.”

Personally, I don’t think so and I can start with examples from my own life because as a child and teenager I was a victim of family violence, but not in the way you might expect. In fact, although I’ve experienced profound emotional and psychological abuse, not to mention serious, physical abuse, it has never been at the hands of the male of the species, but at the hands of the female species. To be perfectly blunt, from the time I was born it has been the females in my life that have abused me in ways that I still struggle to deal with.

Let me explain

When I was two my dad flocked off and left my mom to fend for herself with two small children. For the next ten or so years my mom, who I know loved me, nevertheless subjected my brother and I to emotional, psychological, and physical abuse. This women beat me and my brother with belts, spoons, and other household implements to the point where the implements broke and we were battered and bruised. The physical abuse was bad, as bad as any “daddy figure” could have subjected us to, but as bad as it was it was the emotional and psychological abuse that hurt the most. She used to force me and my brother into corners for long periods of time, cut us off from love for extended periods, make us feel small and unloved, and generally engage in textbook examples of emotional and psychological abuse. She even left us once or twice screaming and crying as she abandoned us to our own devices, all the while saying she was going to jump off the downtown bridge and kill herself! Can you imagine the emotional and psychological scarring that comes to the eight year old child listening to their mother threaten to leave them alone, desperate for the love, attention, and care that parents are supposed to provide. I won’t go into the details of the psychological and emotional impact of this long term and systemic abuse we experienced, but I don’t think you have to have a very developed imagination, or a graduate degree in psychology, to know this abuse affected us in a profoundly negative fashion.

And you know, for all the talk of women victims of male violence, it wasn’t just my mother who abused me. I remember my first girl friend, a female by the name of Bonnie, who once danced gaily around me all the while she was smacking me repeatedly in the face, laughing, and telling me I’d never understand why she was doing that. I have to admit, I didn’t understand why someone you had been dating for almost a year would treat you with such callous and mean spirited disregarded. All I could do was stand there in shock. And for those who think that men are innately violent let me point out that I didn’t strike back. All I did was stand there and take it. In retrospect I think it was that experience that solidified this basic truth for me that that on this world, the people most likely to hurt and abuse you are the people you let get close to you.

And that’s only two examples. Let me also mention in passing the catholic nun I had in grade one, the female English teacher, or my cousin who babysat us and thought it was funny to terrorize small children with stories of monsters under our beds, or any of the number of violent and abusive females in my life over the years.

Do you get the point?

If I had to answer a survey, based on my experience, on the gender that I felt was the most violent and mean, it would hands down be females. Men don’t even register on the scale, in my experience.

And I know it is not just me that has experienced the violence of women. My wife and I have been doing couples counseling now and we see regular examples of violent women who manage to skirt below the radar because of the “in play” gender stereotypes. That is, women can be the primary abusers but men can be the targets of “therapy” because the therapists themselves cannot see beyond their gender scripting. They act according to their social scripts, blame the husband, and proceed with counseling on those grounds. It is a huge failure on the part of the psychological establishment because as a result of their failure to see the reality of the situation, children who are victims of female abuse never get  the help they need. And what’s particularly troublesome about this is that if the husband in a relationship ever “snaps” and slaps his wife, he would be the one arrested, charged, and put in jail. In other words, he would become a statistic and he would become “proof” of the violent male and consequently the reality of female violence would be submerged, hidden, and forgotten.

Perhaps you can see why I get so annoyed by the “all women” campaign.

Really?

All women want to stop family violence?

All women are victims?

All women need to stand together?

My question is simple? Why can’t the women who want to end family violence stand with the men who want to end family violence and work outside of socially scripted, and largely irrelevant, gender roles?

Why do they have to stand alone?

Why do they have to perpetrate the illusion that it’s only men that abuse?

Well, there are lots of reasons for that I think. One, the media panders to this illusion. They highlight examples of female abuse in the news, produce cop shop after cop show presenting us with a “reality” of male violence, or simply ignore the examples of female violence occurring all around them.

Two, men and women are socialized to use different types of violence, one visible and one invisible. Men are encouraged to use their fists, knives, and guns. Boys are given action figures and they learn to go around beating and blowing up anybody defined as “the bad guy.” Girls, on the other hand, are given dolls and Care Bears. If a girl picks up an action figure it will be taken away from her. As a result, girls and boys learn a different form of violence. Consequently, the violence men perpetrate is more visible. If you hit a child the bruise is obvious. But if you call it names and make it feel small or hurt its feelings, no visible scars are left.

And let me be clear that female violence, for all its invisibility, is no less hurtful or damaging than the male counterpart. As the vice principle at my daughter’s school recently told me (and as any elementary or middle school teacher will confirm) girls, after they have absorbed the hierarchical ranking behaviors that are taught by our schools, are far more cruel and vicious than boys are. Boys, says the principle, beat each other up in the school yard and then it is over, but girls go on constant, subtle, often coordinated, and deeply vicious attacks

Boys use their fists; girls use their emotions and their words.

It is just a different type of violence.

As a society we simply haven’t learned to register the type of violence and abuse that females engage in, but it is still profound and damaging. As one little boy who had a really violent childhood experience can attest (i.e. me), I’d have rather been beaten by a male than subjected to the ongoing emotional horror of the females in my life. At least with the beating, the pain goes away. At least if I had been beaten by a male, some social worker or psychologist or teacher may have noticed it, and I and my brother may have gotten the help we needed instead of, like the children of our St. Albert family, having to bare the abuse in silent obscurity for the decades of primary socialization we all go through.

Of course, there are other reasons for the invisibility of female violence besides the media’s ignorance or the quality of violence. A third reason is that we, and by “we” I mean those who experience that violence, often hide it out of fear of being further abused. As a younger male I could never tell anybody about what my girlfriend did to me because if I had I would have been laughed at. I know what the reaction of my friends would have been. They would have told me to slap her back and then they would have laughed at me and thought me less of a man because I got beat by a woman. And God forbid I went to the police station to report the assault. I’m not sure that my young and fragile male ego could have handled the total ridicule I would have experienced and so I, like so many others, remained silent about it.

Fourth, we aren’t aware of the violence that females perpetrate because “we” I mean everybody, minimize what females do. If you hit someone it’s obviously violent, but if you exclude someone from your social clique because you don’t like their looks and personality, or because they come from the wrong “demographic,” or because they aren’t “perky,” if you call them names or make them feel like shit inside, if you point your finger and laugh, that’s not violence. It’s the boys fighting in the yard that are violent. The girls engaged in psychological and emotional abuse simply aren’t on the radar.

Finally, we also have serious gender biases to contend with in this regard., especially around the emotions and sensitivity of males. Boys are supposed to be tough, right? Boys aren’t supposed to have emotions. Boys aren’t supposed to feel. Boys aren’t supposed to cry. Boys aren’t supposed to show weakness. Boys are supposed to “soldier up” and tough it out. In short, boys are supposed to castrate themselves emotionally and if they don’t, then they are feeble, gay, pussies. So if a boy is being beaten by a woman, or if a boy is crying because his mother hurt him, then it is the boy’s problem because he’s weak. If he would just toughen up and act like a man, everything would be ok. Frankly that’s a primitive load of gender based bullshit. What you end up with when you raise your boys like this is a society of emotionally castrated men who can’t connect with anybody, who can’t empathize with other living beings, and who are far more likely to engage in violent acts than they would have been if their natural childhood sensitivity had not been socialized out of them. And just in case you are not making the connection here, let me make it for you. Women are just as responsible for the violence that men perpetrate as the men are. When you hand your child the violent action figures, when you give them the toy weapons, when you belittle them for having emotions, when you tell them that boys don’t cry, when you invalidate their emotions and tell them to toughen up, when you cut off their loving and expressive nature, when you scream, yell, and beat, you are creating the next generation of violent males.

Think about it!

Females are the primary caregivers, after all.

Take a look at the homes and the daycares and the schools.

Females are the ones who care and socialize the children in the first decade or so of life. So unless we want to chalk it all up to genetics (i.e. men are naturally more violent), an argument that only flies in sociologically naive circles, women (not to mention teachers, schools, the media, our paramilitary and military organizations) are going to have to step up and take at least some responsibility for the violence we all experience.

Now I could go on and talk about a biased statistical and criminal system, how emotionally castrated men are created to feed the requirements of The System, and so on, but I won’t because I think I’ve made my point. What I will say at this point is that if you’re really interested in stopping violence in the family, then stop perpetrating it. Take a look at how you treat people in your life, the boys, the girls, the children, and your spouse. Take a look at what you teach them and how you expect them to behave and quit pretending you’re not part of the problem. We’re all part of the problem and until we take our gender blinders off, until we stop organizing ourselves into groups, until we stop excluding each other from our clicky cliques, until we stop playing gender games, until we learn to stand together and face the problems we have created, we won’t be making any progress towards our goal of stopping the violence in our society. Instead we’ll just be perpetuating the myths and illusions, hiding the truth, and absolving ourselves of our responsibility .

—

p.s. Towards the goal of ending family violence I would like to invite males and females to share their accounts of the female violence they have experienced. Write it up and submit it to this journal where we will publish it. We won’t use your name (unless you want us to), and we may include your account in a future book on female violence. Help us end family violence by sharing with us the reality of your experience.

This article originally appeared in Volume Three of The Electronic Journal of Sociology. It is reproduced here as part of the debate on the challenges of higher education.

Introduction

Canada has a well-known history of telecommunications innovation. What many Canadians don’t know  is that Ericsson does as well, with new ideas flowing from our research and development centres for over 100 years. That’s why Ericsson is funding the Centre for Wireless Communications at the University of Waterloo, the first graduate school of its kind in Canada. Soon, CWC graduates will make us proud with creative new wireless solutions made in Canada. Stimulating innovation is a mark of Ericsson’s leadership, both in Canada and around the world. You’re going to hear more from Ericsson.Advertisement, Maclean’s, March 16, 1998

The Business of Higher Education

In the past two decades in Canada, as in the UK before it,” there can hardly be a school, hospital, social services department, university or college …that has not in some way become permeated by the language of enterprise…. from the hospital to the railway station, from the classroom to the museum, the nation finds itself translated. ‘Patients’, ‘parents’, ‘passengers’ and ‘pupils’ are reimaged as ‘customers’” (du Gay and Salaman, 1992: 622). Business attitudes and speech, plus the shades of meaning associated with market theories have engulfed primary and secondary school systems (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996; Firestone, 1994; Ball, 1993). Discourses of efficiency, accountability, and consumerism have transformed the public sector and overflowed into the university, threatening academe’s principles of social betterment, its spaces of public debate, its teaching and its research. The university has become hooked on the discourse of the market-driven enterprise.

The outward signs are the business logos and trademarks that permeate Canadian universities. Pepsi has the monopoly at University of Calgary food courts, while at the University of Alberta, Coca Cola monopolises the campus. Students at the University of Calgary’s Centre for International Peace and Understanding and Fine Arts attend lectures inside” The Husky Oil Great Hall,” or meet peers and talk over ideas in” The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Hub” or” the Scotia Bank Milling Area.”¹ Corporate names mark the entrance ways to buildings on many university campuses. Athabasca University has even placed trademarks on its slogans” Learning Without Limits^TM” and” Canada’s Open University^TM.” And as the University of Alberta tells us,” it makes sense” (or is that cents?). Similar patterns exist at universities across the country (Dwyer, 1997).

Academic positions, teaching and research are also named, marked, and shaped by tied aid. Tied aid is unlike grants and other forms of donations. This money comes with strings attached. As Bruneau notes, it a common practice these days.” …old fashioned philanthropy …unencumbered gifts…become scarce in a period when ‘inputs’ are nearly always tied to ‘outputs’” (Bruneau, 1998). At the University of Alberta, the Networks of Centres of Excellence on Sustainable Forest Management is funded, in part, by the forest industry and, in the main, by public funds. Centre representatives legitimate the union of public and private money by arguing that Centre research “tackles relevant problems and focuses on realistic solutions,” and” works closely with those organisations that are in the best position to implement the results of the Network’s research.”² This means university graduate students and their professors carry out research for, and work closely with, the pulp, paper and forestry companies who exploit the public forests of Canada.

Cultural theorists use the term” discourse” to describe” the cultural ‘fixing’ of certain meanings, and their constant reproduction and circulation.” The fixing of a discourse brings closure to social debate. It shifts attention away from how explanations and justifications are constructed and how cultural meanings are embedded in these justifications. As a result,” other possible ways of making sense … have been absented, discouraged or closed out” (O’Sullivan et al., 1994: 93). This leaves a form of intellectual totalitarianism in the absence of critical awareness. In higher education, market discourses of accountability, enterprise, and efficiency are pressuring teachers and administrators to see themselves as providers of a service to consumers. As such thinking about education penetrates the academy, and funding cuts trickle down, increasingly we are in danger of losing much of the substance of the higher education.

The Service University and Market Discipline

In the late 1980s Newson and Buchbinder (1988) outlined the sociological conditions, inside and outside universities, that gave us the” service university vision.” They encouraged analysis of the social and political context in which linkages between universities and corporations occurred. Since that time, significant changes have occurred that have forced a much tighter union between university and corporation. Increased funding cuts to universities have altered the make-up of university budgets, putting more pressure on universities to seek alternative funding sources.

Alternative funding can come from a number of areas none of which increase the independence of the university. One source is increased tuition fees. In 1980 universities received $6.44 in grants for each dollar collected in tuition fees. By 1995 the figure had dropped to $2.97 (Statistics Canada, 1997). Students have always paid a proportion of their actual education costs. However, under the new market mentality tuition fees rose by 86 percent between 1983 and 1995 (Statistics Canada, 1997). Today, student fees provide, on average, 24.3 per cent of Canadian university budgets.

The explanation for tuition increases is not simply that governments are focused on deficit reduction. Rather, fee increases and cuts to university funding comprise part of the larger discourse that emphasises educational production for the market. This discourse assumes that universities should operate as businesses in the service of a client market. Certain assumptions are made here. First, students are seen as the key customers. Universities are to gear themselves towards satisfying these customers. Second, it is thought that the customers should take greater responsibility for their education by paying higher tuition. Third, higher fees are seen as beneficial because they will encourage students to make more informed choices in choosing their university education. And finally, once students become concerned with the quality of their education, universities will have to pay attention. The end result of this is that market discipline is forced on universities.

Besides subjecting universities to the discipline of the consumer, universities are subjected to market discipline in other ways. While it varies, most garner greater proportions of their operating budgets through corporate donations than they did in the past. In addition a new form of revenue, created by governments steeped in market ideologies, and called” performance based funding,” rewards universities for achievements that reflect their” responsiveness” to the marketplace. In Alberta, universities must take home a” report card.” Among other things, this report card looks for growing student enrollment (when there is no increase in base funding), examines graduate satisfaction with the educational experience (the education must be job or career relevant), and looks at the ratio of administrative overhead to direct expenses. Finally, in this report card, universities are rewarded for” enterprise revenue.” Enterprise revenue is earnings generated by the sale of university” services” in the commercial marketplace. Examples include the sale of classroom space to business or other institutions, or the marketing of survey expertise to the private sector. At the University of Alberta, the Population Research Laboratory (a social survey unit) now competes directly in the commercial market.

Ironically, the performance based funding envelope is quite a small percentage of a university’s operating grant. Compared to the effort required by universities to collect this data, it may cost more than what it is worth (a deep irony when economic efficiency is the ostensible goal). However, it serves the ideological agenda of a Tory government that wants to be seen, by the public, as compelling the university sector to adopt business techniques. The long-term fear is that, if the universities are successful in marketing their services, the government might raise performance funding to 10 per cent of operating funds.

There is more (Alberta Advanced Education and Career Development, 1997), but this gives the reader an indication of the essence of the Alberta government’s university evaluation system. The net results of this shift in funding sources is that universities become less dependent on government sources of revenue, and more dependent on sources of revenue that come with strings attached. The visible representations of this dependence, the Coca Cola monopoly, the lecture hall inscriptions, and now even the students (who are wearing industry jackets) speak clearly about the effects of this dependence. What meager independence the universities once had is being slowly but inexorably colonised physically, intellectually, and spiritually. As Newson and Buchbinder feared” the university means business” and defenders of public funding for universities are being pushed to the margins.

Not all academics oppose this business mentality. Newson and Buchbinder found many splits (1988). And there are winners. Dominelli and Hoogvelt identify two groups benefiting from the market mentality. They are the “privatized professionals” or former state and university employees and the petty bourgeois intellectuals. This latter group comprises” those within universities who are good at grasping opportunities that the market presents” (1996:89). Ranged against these intellectual opportunists are the critics of corporate-university connections. Dominelli and Hoogvelt call them activist and/or postmodernist intellectuals. It is time we examined some of the implications of the new business models for the academies of higher learning.

Accountability

In neo-right discourse, subjecting Universities to the discipline of the market is described as raising the accountability of institutions. Universities become “accountable” to students, taxpayers, and the businesses who fund the research laboratories and lecture halls. Such calls for accountability are not new. In the sixties, this clarion call for accountability was first heard. At that time, universities were jostled out of their self-assuredness by loudly voiced student demands that universities pay attention to student needs. This led to” increased student involvement in decision-making, more diverse course offerings, and greater sensitivity to the concerns of minority groups” (Krahn and Silzer, 1995: 13). Today, however,” accountability” has been redefined not by students for students, but because:

…politicians and the public as a whole started to ask more critical questions about the purpose and performance of colleges and universities. Provincial governments across Canada have made deficit reduction one of their primary goals, and, therefore, have begun to demand more accountability from postsecondary institutions (Krahn and Silzer, 1995: 13).

Today’s post-secondary institutions are held accountable to government for their economic efficiency – a measure more appropriate to the production of goods, than the provision of education. Universities” prove” their value by turning out satisfied consumers and quality products with a minimum of resources. We get the most bang for the public’s education buck. This shift to a” clientocracy” is significant. Instead of accountability to the deeper educational needs of students, to issues of social justice and equity, and to a standard of truth not coupled with hegemonic discourse, we are now becoming accountable to narrow criteria of economic efficiency. This new accountability and these new appeals to innovation differ from those of past critics of universities (Friere, 1971; Stumpf, 1979; Feldman, 1993; Broder and Dorfman, 1994), or from publications devoted to improved learning (e.g., Teaching Sociology and The Teaching Professor).

Some see a positive change in this new climate. Proponents argue that application of market principles to university education will make it flexible, innovative and cheap. However, many more refute the notion that forced accountability through cuts and performance funding will lead to better education (Bruneau, 1998). Yet some universities continue instituting performance criteria willingly, believing it better to retain certain controls rather than have accountability unilaterally imposed.

It is clear that the social and political climate of the 1990s is forcing colleges and universities to move in the direction of self-evaluation. In our opinion, postsecondary institutions would benefit more, and perhaps suffer less, if they took the initiative to devise and implement a valid set of performance indicators rather than wait for someone else to impose a less appropriate set of measures (Krahn and Silzer, 1995: 13).

We can reasonably ask whether or not participating in the colonization is an effective strategy. Outside the university, in the lower systems of education, there is much evidence to suggest that accountability and its accompanying restructuring have caused loss of job security, work intensification, decline in pay, and declining quality of services (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996). From our own perspective, the strategy of beating the government to the performance indicator punch lacks an assessment of student needs, and a pedagogical rationale. It is more of a damage control measure designed to appease those who hold the purse strings. Furthermore, the strategy harbours a built-in conservative bias that makes its efficacy dubious. Given this model, if teachers or administrators innovate, they do so at the cost of not doing well in the government set performance indicators.

Complicity in this performance indicator exercise could be the Trojan Horse that imports new political ideologies into universities through seemingly value- neutral techniques. Ironically, many professors and students seem silent and even complicit in the issues despite the fact that the new accountability means altering the very experience of university life as we suggest below.

Changing Demographics

Cutbacks to higher education funding are ongoing. In response, university administrators have raised tuition fees. In Alberta, for example, there have been tuition increases of between 174% and 227% in the past ten years. And there is no indication that the situation will get any better anytime soon. In Alberta, we expect nearly 37,000 new students by the year 2005. Yet the government has indicated there will be no increase in base funding, instead proposing that any funding increases be tied to outcome-based measures (Faculty Circuit, 1998). Other provinces and other institutions are also experiencing the pressure. At some universities in the maritime provinces of Canada students pay over half of their institutions operating costs (Bruneau, 1998).

Statistic Canada argues that the evidence is mixed as to whether rising fees have become a barrier. Although enrolments fell in 1994 and 1995, they are up 30 per cent between 1983 and 1995 (Statistics Canada, 1997: 23). Nevertheless there is cause for concern. Authors of the report Post-Secondary Education in Alberta(1997) note that in the province’s 1996 High-School Graduates Survey,” 64% of graduates felt that ‘post-secondary education is getting too expensive for people like me’ and 38% of those not attending PSE immediately after graduation were delaying entry because they couldn’t afford it.” It seems naive to think that a continuing rise in tuition will not have an impact on enrollment at some point. While absolute numbers may continue to rise for a time simply because our credentialed society demands more from the future workforce, the social class of people attending our instituions may shift dramatically. As Ball’s study of the UK and USA found, funding cuts and restructuring were thinly-veiled forms of class warfare designed to reproduce “relative social class (and ethnic) advantages and disadvantages” (1993: 4).

While most provinces in Canada place absolute limits on the proportion of the operating expenses that can be extracted from students, these limits are now coming under pressure. The worst possible scenario, unregulated tuition fees, was announced in December of 1997 by the government of Ontario. Astronomically higher tuition rates are expected (Lewington, 1997). If deregulation of tuition fees succeeds in Mike Harris’ Ontario, we can expect other provinces to interpret it as an indication of public acceptance.

The Changing Classroom

The net result of the desire to do more with less, only better, has been a decline in the quality of education, and the creation of Fordist-style degree mills (Noble, 1997). Postmodern theorists call it” performativity,” that is,” the capacity to deliver outputs at the lowest cost [which] replaces truth as the yardstick of knowledge” (Crook et. al. in Delucchi and Smith, 1997: 323). In practical terms,” performativity” means upping the student-teacher ratio. An extreme example must be the first year psychology class with 1200+ students at the University of Western Ontario (University Teaching Services, 1988). Even third year classes with 200 + students are no longer unusual. Assuming a tuition fee of $350, a class of 1200 students would generate $420,000 dollars. With such a classroom model universities would need to hire only one instructor, a few tutors, and some technicians and their budget problems would be resolved. But increasing class size does not lead to increased quality of education

Increases in teacher-to-student ratios have a negative effect on learning because they reduce the time instructors have available for each student and often result in significant changes to instruction and evaluation. Research on class size and student performance suggests that pedagogical technique is the most important variable in determining the quality of a learning experience: classes that are engaging, have the opportunity for one- on-one discussion and encourage participation achieve high quality learning. Class size directly affects the choice of technique (i.e. large classes reduce the ability of instructors to involve students in discussion and debate); rising class sizes make it increasingly difficult to maintain the quality of the learning experience. Large classes force instructors to abandon essay and laboratory exams that test students’ ability to apply knowledge in situations similar to those they will face in the workforce in favour of multiple-choice testing (Post-Secondary Education in Alberta, 1997: 21-2).

Instructors who are shifted from class to class or who are dealing with increased student numbers feel pressure to rethink their teaching strategies. For example, many rely on evaluation methodologies that some have suggested have dubious pedagogical value – such as multiple choice exams coded by computers. Responding to the pressure to develop efficiencies, instructors (sometimes allied with powerful business interests) are also seeking innovative methods of course delivery. Moving in to fill the new demand in this brave new academic environment are the multinational book publishing houses which offer canned class materials, predeveloped lectures, overheads, web-based materials, automated exam banks and other ancillary course material (Anon, 1998). Alongside increased video and computer technologies in teaching, however, canned class materials are reminiscent of the first wave of scientific management strategies designed to separate the individual components of the labour process in order to deskill and deprofessionalise (Braverman, 1974).

These new teaching methods need to be seen in the larger context of the Taylorisation of intellectual labour (Dominelli and Hoogvelt, 1996); the separation of teaching and research; the growth of part-time, contract work (Newson and Buchbinder, 1988); and the use of technology in university teaching (Noble, 1997). The patterns are ominous. Evidence from the lower systems of education suggest that the restructuring of intellectual work has caused job insecurity, work intensification, decline in pay, and declining quality of service to students (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996) It is not unreasonable to assume a future university where teaching technicians, assisted by expensive technology, will deliver multimedia learning materials to hundreds of students. It has already happened in the secondary school system (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996).

Commodification, Colonization, and Discipline

The issues go deeper than access and quality of education. Under subtle but direct attack is the very existence of an academy of free inquiry. Universities have always made space for criticism of the status quo, confirmed over the years no doubt by intermittent assaults on the notion of a tenured faculty. Yet today it seems the new world order is eroding critical inquiry in novel and more effective ways through the ongoing commodification and colonization of the academy with forms of discourse most appropriate for the marketplace. As Norman Fairclough (1992: 207) notes of the process of commodification:

Commodification is the process whereby social domains and institutions, whose concern is not producing commodities in the narrower economic sense of goods for sale, come nevertheless to be organized and conceptualized in terms of commodity production, distribution and consumption…. In terms of orders of discourse, we can conceive of commodification as the colonization of institutional orders of discourse, and more broadly of the societal order of discourse, by discourse types associated with commodity production.

In” Can Virtue be Bought? Moral Education and the Commodification of Values,” Daryl Pullman examines an interesting example of this colonization. As he notes, the growth industry in applied ethics has reversed the decline of philosophy departments. Pullman is wary of this success. Like the processes described by Fairclough, Pullman describes how” moral education as it is ostensibly practised in our university settings and in the private sector, is likened to an industry that produces and markets a certain kind of good.” He argues that academic departments are competing” to convince the powers that be that what they have to offer is important, or better, essential, and hence that their particular discipline deserves a bigger piece of the pie.” The price paid for this wantonness, however, is a pedagogical one. Philosophers end up presenting themselves” as merchants with something to sell,” instead of” catalysts in an important process of moral development” that is,” educating society on the need for a different process” (Pullman, 1994).

In New Zealand, a similar market mentality has impacted educators and students and has had powerful results:

The market has been seen as the ideal model on which to base educational arrangements. Competition between students, staff and institutions has been encouraged. Students have been redefined as” consumers”, and tertiary education institutions have become” providers”. Bureaucrats now talk of” inputs”, “outputs” and” throughputs” in the education system. Any notion of educational processes serving a form of collective public good has all but disappeared; instead, participation in tertiary education in now regarded as a form of private investment (Roberts, 1998).

Du Gay and Salaman (1992: 615) suggest that the implications extend as far as the” conduct and identities of employees” because defining students as “customers” makes it possible to couple administrative discipline of teachers with consumer feedback. Michel Foucault (1977) linked disciplinary power with visibility in his popularisation of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic disciplinary mechanism. Today’s proposals to evaluate student-teacher relations appear designed to increase the visibility of the academic worker inside the formerly opaque classroom. Efforts to make workers visible to management are identified by Fuller and Smith (1991) in their study of” Management by Customers” and less flatteringly, by du Gay and Salaman in” Consumer Cult[ure]” (1992). Consider Townley’s take on Human Resource Management (HRM) techniques:

HRM serves to render organizations and their participants calculable arenas, offering, through a variety of technologies, the means by which activities and individuals become knowable and governable. HRM disciplines the interior of the organization, organizing time, space, and movement within it. Through various techniques, tasks, behavior, and interactions are categorized and measured. HRM provides measurements of both physical and subjective dimensions of labor offering a technology that renders individuals and their behavior predictable and calculable. … familiar tools of personnel management – skills inventories, performance appraisal systems, assessments and evaluation methods, attitude measurements – are all arrangements for ranking, which facilitate a serial ordering of individuals….These schemes are…very much disciplinary techniques (Townley, 1993: 526-529).

The common technique used by universities, the student survey administered at the end of a semester, takes on new meaning when interwoven with discourses of student satisfaction. These surveys are used to monitor and correct instructor performance (Rose, 1989). Tied into the culture of the student as consumer, however,” the rating procedure is… transformed…[from] an irksome, intrusive and threatening technique of management control, ….[to] a benevolent … technique to assist individuals to become their true selves and to realise their aspirations” (Grey 1994: 489). Rarely does an administrative officer have to correct the teacher. Teachers discipline themselves by shifting their pedagogical strategies. The authority of the ideology of” self-betterment” and “good service” vested in the survey instrument make it hard to question, especially for term and sessional instructors. Management control over workers is obscured in the process.

Concerned about survey feedback, and not wanting to create dissatisfied student-consumers, some teachers (especially those not protected by tenure) shift away from critical pedagogy and free experimentation towards classroom teaching that is low risk, more conservative, and more entertaining. Pedagogical strategies are designed to net acceptable report cards. Likewise students, instead of seeing themselves as participants in the education process, or as junior colleagues there to learn from those preceding them, internalise the consumer role and see themselves as purchasers of a product that must meet their own specifications.

Education thus becomes the consumption of non-threatening entertainment, which, at its best, puts pedagogical control into the hands of the students (Edmundson, 1997) and, at it worst, demands that offensive (dare we say challenging) academic material be expurgated from the course lest it offend sensibilities. Merit, hard work, and actually getting students to learn something become less important to staff than pleasing students (Long and Lake, 1996). Indeed, studies have show that personality can explain as much as 90 percent of the variance in instructor ratings (Deluchi and Smith, 1997).

As student’s ideas of what constitutes a good education shift, and as they adopt the consumer mentality, the pressure to pander to student expectations can become intense and irresistable. In California, after reading a psychology course disclaimer saying” This is a class for mature adult students wherein sexually explicit material will be discussed in [an] open, frank manner…” a student promptly initiated a sexual harassment suit saying” I don’t like X-rated movies and I don’t read X-rated books. So I don’t think I should have to take an X-rated class” (Globe and Mail, 1998). The comparison of a university course with other forms of consumer goods, and the call to consumer accountability, is unmistakable.

As Brookfield (1995) notes, the new discourse violates the teachers deeply held convictions about how to teach in a meaningful and critical fashion. It is impossible to teach critically in an environment dominated by the consumer ethic because education is not always easy, painless, or emotionally uplifting. Yet, as noted, the new environment encourages a shift in pedagogical authority towards the students. The result is an environment where the whims of the student’s are catered to at the expense of sound pedagogical strategy. This is not to discount the need to engage the students in a relationship characterized by concern, mutual respect, and dedication (Boyd, 1997). However it is to question whether or not the new environment is conducive to anything more than superficial contact and superficial learning.

Significant learning and critical thinking inevitably induce an ambivalent mix of feelings and emotions, in which anger and confusion are as prominent as pleasure and clarity. The most hallowed rule of business – that the customer is always right – is often pedagogically wrong. Equating good teaching with a widespread feeling among students that you have done what they wanted ignores the dynamics of teaching and prevents significant learning (Brookfield, 1995: 21. Italics added).

Students’ re-definitions of themselves as consumers reinforce, in turn, teacher strategies to produce satisfied and entertained consumers. Students will lose in the long run.

Corporate Boards of Governors?

In Canada in the 1990s, deficit reduction and balanced budgeting have become a mantra and universities seem caught up in it:” We have to operate more efficiently and be more focused because we can’t do everything,” says Frederick Lowy, Rector and Vice-Chancellor, of Concordia University. At Carleton University in Ottawa, this dictum means closing and streamlining programs such as languages, literature, and comparative literary studies and laying-off tenured faculty – despite apparent high demand for their graduates. Such cutbacks are dangerous, and move us towards accepting an economic logic that will justify lopping off other” unproductive” departments. The ultimate direction of this rethinking was succinctly stated by Ontario Premier Mike Harris, who claimed that geography and sociology programs were, in the current economic environment, surplus (Lewiston, 1997: 1).

In Canada, governments appoint public members of university boards of governors. These university boards often have included corporate leaders, in greater and lesser degrees (Ornstein, 1988). Their potential for influence, however, was often restricted to indirect shaping of relatively resilient academic institutions based on collegial decision-making and tradition. Nowadays, in an era of public accountability, restructuring, performance indicators and revenue based funding, members of boards of governors are often involved in questioning the very nuts and bolts of the university as an organisation:” neo-liberals seek to change fundamentally the way in which universities function” (Horn, 1998: 20).

While it is true that some board members are interested citizens, contributing their time and energy to universities (albeit with a business approach to problem- solving and little acceptance of academic or collegial decision-making), in most cases they are on boards to carry out the key functions of approving budget plans and expenditures, and securing funds for cash-strapped universities from the private sector. David Bond, Chair of the Board of Governors at Simon Fraser University and V.P. of Government and Public Affairs at the Hong Kong Bank of Canada, states that:” Board members are put on the board to give money or raise money. It’s like an honourary degree,” …” You either give, get or get out. I can understand concerns over exclusivity. But unless the public opens its cheque book this is the avenue for survival for the great universities” (Bond, quoted in Schmidt, 1997).

Cross-linked with the corporate and finance sectors in ways that would make Domhoff wince, representatives of business in Canada preside over the future of many Canadian universities. That these corporate leaders and university fund raisers, for the most part, champion neo-liberal economic models and have restructured their own firms, means that we could well expect them to think likewise about university affairs. The Vice-President of the Hong Kong Bank of Canada sits on council at Simon Fraser University. The President of the Bank of Montreal holds the chief position at the University of Toronto. A retired banker sits at Acadia. Last year the top decision-makers at McGill University included the chief executive officers of the Royal Bank, Noranda Inc., Canadian National Railway Co., and BCE Inc. They were backed up by senior executives from the Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Ernst & Young and Canadian Pacific Ltd. (Schmidt, 1997).

In the context of this physical (as opposed to intellectual) colonization, significant resistance to the corporate and neo-right agenda disappears. Negative consequences for the public may ensue. For example, might not board representatives from banks encourage and approve higher tuition rates in the name of making students responsible for their education, while banks provide and profit from student loans? Doesn’t big industry gain access to cutting-edge university research without footing the majority of the bill (responsible students and taxpayers still do most of that)? It’s possible though that business may not be satisfied with their beachhead in the universities. They may want more. This was vividly demonstrated by the announcement to construct the Technical University of British Columbia. This is an institution” designed specifically to work closely with industry in turning out job-ready graduates in technology-related fields” (Came, 1997: 65), and structured in such a way as to allow no student or faculty input into governance, and no tenure. Perhaps this is the underlying subtext of the word” accountable.”

The trends seem obvious and, in a way, unsurprising. ”Years ago the university shaped itself to an industrial ideal – the knowledge factory” (Rowe, 1990). Science at the service of culture, industry and the status quo has a long history (Goonatilake, 1982; Haraway, 1986; Shields, 1987; Jacob, 1988; Harding, 1993), so current trends continue many past practices. Now there is renewed vigour in the assault, made possible by the elimination and/or harnessing of alternative discourses that might counter the hegemonic ones of Weberian rationality and economic efficiency (Schiller, 1989). The space where critics once voiced counter discourses is left gapping. Dare challenge efficiency calculations and you risk being marginalised or branded a Luddite educator unconcerned with quality, unaware of the new economic contingencies, or incapable of reason and common sense.

Counterpoints

The ability to pursue ideas in circumstances where failure is not judged by the narrow criteria of profitability is essential for universities. A halt must be put to panoptic controls and one-dimensional educational discourses. Here are six counterpoints:

• Recognize the political struggle over education (Spencer, 1998) and do not reduce issues of efficiency and accountability to some post-modern turn (Delucchi and Smith, 1997,) or a shift in demographics (Eisenberg, 1997). Resist performance indicators or find indicators capable of tapping pedagogical depth. The claim that economic efficiency and accountability is in the best interest of students is false, and must be opposed.
• Show how new forms of accountability are not in the best interests of universities, and must be resisted. This means exposing narrow business assumptions and interests, and demonstrating their pedagogical implications.
• Support the funding of independent research, untied to business interests of goals. Remind the public that important discoveries have historically relied upon long-term government funding of research that showed no obvious signs of commercial benefit. The computer, for example, took 30 years of financial support from the U. S. government before it became the profit generating information technology sector that exists today (Flamm, 1987).
• Stem the culture of consumerism invading universities (based on a discourse of accountability) because it leads to intrusive forms of control. Academics have begun to challenge the efficacy of the consumer accountability paradigm (Sosteric, 1996) and even business is rethinking” the customer is always right” business paradigm and finding that depth of service makes more sense than superficial measures of customer satisfaction. (Keates, 1997). Universities should also emphasise depth of service rather than superficial satisfactions. Instructors could be rewarded for progressive experimentation and the application of innovative pedagogical strategies designed to facilitate this depth.
• Offer a constructive alternative program. A multi-tiered alternative would redefine” accountability” to not only mean accountability to students, but also the accountability of students to their own education. Students need to take an active role in defining their own needs within a critique of the consumer model of education. Universities, for their part, have to emphasise that they can accommodate the needs of students for jobs but only while developing the student’s ability to think critically, provide constructive criticism of the status quo, and offer ethical alternatives (Rowe, 1990).
  It is important to recognise that a shallow, consumer led education system does not produce the skills needed for today’s complex high tech social world. We are constantly being told of the need to create workers capable of” informating” (Zuboff, 1988), that is, thinking laterally, and with depth and breadth so as to be able to creatively problem solve. Students need to be let in on this debate and convinced that the current environment is not giving them these informating skills.
• Recapture the student/teacher relationship with a new metaphor. Apprenticeship seems an appropriate starting metaphor. Others might evolve. Students should be viewed not as consumers, but as junior academic partners who are guided through the steps required to develop logical and theoretical thinking skills. Teachers must do this carefully and with sensitivity, always with respect for student needs, never with the assumption that the student” needs” or even” wants” consumer style education. We can easily create a” post-modern” style of education where student voice and multi-vocality are prized without descending into the dark depths of consumer rhetoric.

The risk is great if we sit idly by and watch our academic and democratic freedoms, and our ability to resist through critical education, placed under a panoptic microscope or rudely dismantled. Criticising the social order and challenging the new accountability are imperative in an environment where governments are shifting farther to the right. In Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s government has” In its 2 1/2 years in office, … removed safeguards against executive and bureaucratic arbitrary action, severely eroded the foundations of administrative justice, bypassed and ignored traditional avenues of consultation, substantially abbreviated legislature debate on its lawmaking measures and truncated opportunities for public comment” (Valpy, 1997). Hugh Segal finds that conservative ideologues are beginning to openly apply the criteria of economic efficiency to political debate – suggesting that” deliberation in politics … is no longer affordable.” (Hugh Segal quoted in Valpy, 1997). In elegant understatement, Michael Valpy notes that” The evidence is all there. It’s disturbing.” (Valpy, 1997: A31).

Successful counterpoints to the market driven model of university education depend on political shifts. Universities are rapidly approaching a new juncture, that could prove historically significant. Progressives need to organise and promote ideas that capture the imagination of the public, students, and administrators as we arrive at this intersection. Certain conditions for challenging the neo-right discourse are currently available. Its time we used them.

References

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Endnotes

1. The plaque in The Husky Oil Hall at University of Calgary reads:

Husky Oil is a Canadian-based integrated energy company serving global customers through the dedicated efforts of its employees. Husky Oil is proud to share the ideals of the Centre for International Peace and Understanding and Fine Arts and is conscious that only through positive interaction can we achieve the ideal of international Harmony.

2. See http://nce.nserc.ca/blurbs/foreseng.htm.

]]> http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/university-accountability-market-discipline-late-1990s-2/feed 0 http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/gendered-activities http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/gendered-activities#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:41:53 +0000 Dr. Michael Sosteric http://www.sociology.org/?p=40 [continue reading...]]]> As sociologists, one of our (my wife and I) biggest pet peaves is gendered activities. These are activities where an individual is excluded from participation based on a superficial external sexual characteristic. You know the drill right? Only boys allowed! Only girls allowed. You can’t come in because you have a vagina. You aren’t allowed because you got a penis. It is exclusion and sorting based on sex and gender and to be honest and frank, as two counselors and social scientists working on healing the damage done by patriarchy, and trying to create a saner and just world, it’s a real annoyance.

Why?

Well, because gender based exclusion, one sex only activity, is quite literally the root of all female (and male) oppression in this world.  We’ll stop short of saying it is the root of all evil because as we all know, the root of all evil is love of money. But it is definitely the root of all gender based oppression.

Now we know that’s a pretty bold statement, but bare with us for a moment. We all know that women are not treated equally in this world right? That’s the reality! Women perform 60% of work world wide, they earn 10% of income, and own 10% of the land (Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 2003:243).  Women are segregated into pink collar occupations, enjoy less financial stability, lower rates of pay, and are generally expected to sacrifice their career paths to raise the family while their men get ahead. Women are generally left at home to raise the children (an incredibly difficult and demanding job) with minimal help from their spouses and ironically, this is true even in relationships where the male and female are overtly egalitarian. You can go into a marriage with very high ideals but when the babies come, traditional scripts tend to come into play and it is the women who are the ones who bear the primary responsibility. Of course, take five or six or ten years off your career path to raise children and what do you get? Less raises and fewer promotions! It is a sacrifice that we have to make when we raise children, but it’s almost always the woman who makes that sacrifice.  Ironically, this sacrifice can come back and slap ya in the face when the kids grow up, the marriage breaks up, and the female who made the career sacrifice is left with nothing but the pink collar ghetto. As a result of the “sacrifices” they make, women experience higher rates of depression, poverty, and social stigma. And not only that, women and girls are victims of spousal abuse and sexual violence far more often than men. Globally, around the world, women are oppressed and there is no denying that. If you were born female, you are born with a social and economic handicap that is going to make your life a lot harder than it needs to be if genders were treated equally.

And why is this?

Well, there are a lot of reasons why it happens but if you ask us it all comes down to the fact that we (and by “we” we mean the people of this earth) have convinced ourselves that boys and girls are significantly different on an emotional, intellectual, even spiritual bases. Boys are like this, girls are like that. Boys play with trains, girls play with dolls. Boys are the breadwinners, girls are the nurturers. Boys are stronger, girls are weaker.  If you think about it long enough you’ll probably come up with a hundred oppositional differences between boys and girls.

And how is this related to gender oppression?

Well think about it for a moment. When you believe that there are significant differences between boys and girls, men and women, you have a ready made JUSTIFICATION for just about any gender based inequality, exclusion, or oppression that you might want to think of.

Why do women (why should they) stay home and look after the babies?

Because girls are different!

They are the ones who nurture.

Why can’t girls be doctors?

Because boys are different!

They are smarter and more capable.

Why don’t men participate more in cooking?

Because men are different.

They like mechanical things while girls like to bake.

Why don’t women get paid as much as men?

Because they are different.

They aren’t as motivated or committed as men are.

Why don’t women get promoted as fast?

Because they are different.

Why can’t women be priests in the catholic church?

Because they are different.

You get the picture?

In order to justify and support gender inequality and oppression all you have to do is invoke gender difference. It is that way because boys are girls are different.

Of course at this point some of you will be thinking, well the genders are different. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls. Girls are emotional, irrational, weak. Boys are tough, strong, achievers. Girls like dolls, boys like cars (though tell that to Danica Patrick). Girls are like this, boys are like that. Honestly though, all that’s a load of pseudo-scientific horseshit. There’s really no “scientific” basis to suggest that boys are all that much different than girls. For one, the scientific academy has a huge gender bias that makes any scientific defense of gender differences useless and indefensible. And you can’t argue this. When I did my psychology undergraduate degree twenty years ago, we knew there was a bad gender bias in psychology and psychologists knew they had to do something about it. Sad thing is, they didn’t! In fact after twenty or thirty years of awareness, the gender bias is still there. As much as they may not like to hear it, psychologist are still referencing reality on the basis of their gender perceptions and worse still, they are justifying their bias. In the article linked above the psychologist actually defends scientific methodology suggesting that when it comes to identifying gender bias, science works. But clearly it does not. If scientific methodology has been unable to make much progress against gender bias in research over the last thirty years, if gender bias still exists, how can anybody make a claim that science works or can provide us with valid knowledge about gender.  The conclusions are methodologically straight forward. If there is a systematic bias in the research on gender, the research on gender is not valid. And if after thirty years the bias is still there, then it may certainly be fair to suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we approach gender in science. Certainly it is more reasonable to suggest that than to say, despite the presence of bias, “it’s working.”

Gender similarity, not difference

A second reason that you can’t really believe science when it comes to gender is the bell curve, or rather our misuse of the bell curve. As you all know, the bell curve is a graphed distribution of “characteristics.” You can put anything you want on a bell curve from height and weight to IQ to hair color. When you do that, or rather when you put the sampling means on a graph, you often get what a statistician calls a “normal” distribution. This normal distribution shows the purported distribution of characteristics in a population.

Now, there’s a lot of problems when it comes to using the normal distribution to describe human characteristics but putting those aside for now, what we notice when we graph male and female characteristics on a bell curve is not difference but similarity. You can look at the example graph in this article showing the height and weight of humans differentiated by gender and ask yourself, what do you see.  Do you see the little bit of difference in the tails of the distribution, bend to the statistical indoctrination, and tell yourself the difference is highly significant, or do you look at the amazing overlap? In my view, when you consider the height and weight of male and female what is most striking are the similarities. That is, we are more alike than we are different. Yet if you were a psychologist, or a pop culture pundit, or a chauvinistic male, you might highlight the difference (perhaps because talking about difference makes it look like you’ve actually discovered something) without ever commenting on the similarity. It is a bit odd when you think about it. While it is true there may be difference in the extremes in abilities, sometimes, really what is so remarkable about the genders is their similarities. The truth is, male or female, we all have two arms, two legs, two eyes, an identical looking brain, an intellect, emotions, feelings, and all the things that make us human. We would argue that it is not our differences that are important (though admittedly they can be a lot of fun), it is our similarities and these similarities far outweigh any superficial sexual characteristics that might differentiate us.

Of course, the pseudo-scientific clap trap about gender differences, or the fact that we all chose to focus on difference rather than similarity, isn’t the main point here. The main point is that once you do that, once you allow for the idea that men and women are significantly different (even though it’s their similarities that are arguably more remarkable) then you have created the necessary ideological support (i.e. the rationalization and justification) for gender oppression on this planet. You buy into that dichotomy, you become the oppressor (even if you are the sex being oppressed).  It really is as simple as that.

And what does this have to do with gendered activity? Well, gendered activity is the prototypical gender oppression. It is the prototypical exclusion upon which all other exclusions are based.  Of course, I understand you might have a hard time swallowing this. I mean, what does a girl’s only baby shower, or a boy’s only hockey club, have to do with the suppression of women on this planet? Well, everything because once you polarize the genders, once you create a distinction, once you allow exclusion and sorting based on difference, then it becomes possible to rank, and sort, and organize and deny and exclude along any other indices you can care to think about. If you say, only girls can play or only boys can play then by default you give legitimacy to the mythology of gender difference.  And if you give legitimacy to the myth of gender difference, then you have provided support for the reality of gender oppression.  Of course, you may not like to hear this. You may be sitting comfortably in a life organized around gender based activities, but that doesn’t change the fact that if that is your life, then you are supporting the gender based oppression of women on this planet, even if you don’t want to. It is exactly like the feminists say, the personal is political.

So what are you going to do about it? Well, if you are a male and you have a wife, or a sister, or a mother, or a daughter, and you are interested in seeing them treated equally in this world, then you have to stop thinking about gender differences, stop supporting gendered activities, and start working towards gender inclusion. If you do anything else you are a part of the problem, and a component of the oppression. If you need help, take a page out of this grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no (http://www.tolerance.org/activity/peer-exclusion)

Problem: Sometimes a group of children won’t let another kid play with them just because of their gender. Gender is whether you are a boy or a girl. Sometimes boys will say that a girl can’t play with them. Sometimes girls will say that boys can’t play with them.

Rationale: This isn’t nice. It is wrong to exclude someone just because they are a boy or a girl, or because of their gender. Not letting someone play with you just because of their gender is called bullying, and bullying is not allowed…

If you are a female and you don’t like the social, political, economic and (even) spiritual inequality that becomes possible when we allow gender difference and gender exclusion, if you don’t like the idea of maybe one day finding yourself on the wrong end of a glass ceiling, submerged in a pink collar ghetto, or crying as your husband of twenty years, whom you sacrificed your entire life and career for, leaves you to go hang with a younger female because “that’s what men do,” then take a page out of the same grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no. You can’t say “you can’t play just because you’re a boy.”

And just to be clear, just because you are female doesn’t give you free pass. You don’t get to engage gender inclusions and then complain about the sorry state of this world, or your life, or your daughter’s awful marriage to that “typical male,” down the road. The personal is political and change starts with you.

Oh an incidentally, everything we’ve said here about gender difference and exclusion applies equally well to ageism, racism, or any of the other exclusions, based on difference, that make the inequality of this world go around. As long as we keep thinking of ourselves as different and not as a unified human race, as long as we hang onto our “we and they” mentality (however we choose to spin that), we create the wedge that allows the inequality that causes the suffering that ruins the lives of the vast majority of people on this earth.

References

Eitzen, D. Stanley and Maxine Baca-Zinn. 2003 Social Problems. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Additional Reading

http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/problems/chap-09.htm

http://www.tolerance.org/activity/peer-exclusion

http://personalispolitical.tripod.com/

]]> http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/gendered-activities/feed 2 http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/democracys-dirty-little-secret http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/democracys-dirty-little-secret#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:11:50 +0000 Dr. Michael Sosteric http://www.sociology.org/?p=24 [continue reading...]]]> [amazonify]0745326889:right[/amazonify] A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power

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There are now a range of academic disciplines which have been indelibly marked by — indeed produced by — the interests and actions of the propagandists. The field of Public Relations research, the discipline of marketing, some aspects of Human Resource Management and Management and Business Studies more generally all bear the mark of propaganda victories by their systemic refusal to face their origins in propaganda. nor have sociology, psychology, and political science dealt with their demons over this. It is an incredible victory for great power that there is no institute for the study of propaganda (in its real meaning) anywhere in the world. Those that remain studying propaganda do so almost entirely from within the authorised framework that this happens largely in war. Let us be clear about this. We do mean that most academics have been ‘persuaded’ and have come to see things in terms conducive to great power. (Miller and Dinan, 2004: 180. Italics in original).

So you think that the Nazi’s wrote the book on propaganda do you? You think we live in a functioning democracy? Well, think again. In this book by sociologists David Miller and William Dinan you will discover the truth about public relations, propaganda, and corporate control over the public mind. And I’ll be honest with you, it is not a pretty truth. Did you know, the Nazi’s learned about brainwashing the masses from British and American public relations experts? Did you know, some of this centuries most successful public relations experts where in bed with the most brutal and infamous dictators and “serial human right’s abusers” of all time? Did you know the term public relations is a drop in replacement for the term propaganda and is considered the solution to the elite’s “problem” with democracy? Did you know, Britain’s PR man Max Clifford openly acknowledges he lies on behalf of his political clients? “I’ve been telling lies on behalf of people, businessmen, politicians and countries for 40 years” he says “…All PROs at all levels lie through their teeth.” A Century of Spin provides a fascinating and well researched look into the world of corporate mind control and corporate spin. Beginning at the turn of the century the authors document, in painstaking detail, propaganda victory after victory as the global mind control experts carefully and successfully crafted a mass mind set suitable and accepting of neoliberal market reforms. By engaging in massive (and expensive) brainwashing campaigns (er, sorry, public relations campaigns) and by socializing the world’s most powerful individuals in secret and highly exclusive private clubs and getaways, the PR masters have made the world safe for autocratic control of labor, resource, and economy.

It may not be a pretty or popular argument, especially amongst those working in the corrupted hallways of PR research, and it might be surprising to people who believe their concentrated corporate media is anything other than an extension of ruling class propaganda and control, but if the well documented and candid look at the world of corporate influence and propaganda is accurate as presented by Miller and Dinan, and if functioning democracy is important to you, then it is certainly worth taking a brave and open minded look at.

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