This article engages the philosophy of science of data, with a focus on the extent to which data are always already imbued with racializations. As Alexander Weheliye has argued, racializations are not to be reduced to race but rather is the sociopolitical process that hierarchizes and differentiates bodies producing the entangled by-products of…

This article provides some insight into the constraints on the potential of recognition of prior learning (RPL) to widen access to educational qualifications. Its focus is on a conceptual framework that emerged from a South African study of RPL practices across four different learning contexts. Working from a social realist perspective, it argues…

Higher education educators commonly understand social identities, including gender, to be fluid and dynamic. Lev's (2004) model of four components of sexual identity is commonly used to demonstrate the fluidity of sex, gender, and sexuality for individuals, but it does little to address the fixedness of those constructs. Through a multipronged…

This article examines a grassroots parent organizing effort in a large, high-poverty, urban school district. Drawing from ethnographic field research at a community-based popular education organization, the study describes how parent organizers worked to educate and mobilize Latina/o immigrant parents on issues of educational justice and equity.…

Burrell and Morgan's widely-cited "Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis" is applied here to research on distributed leadership in education. Nearly all of the extant research is regulatory, not radical; and the evidence which it has generated falls broadly within the paradigm of interpretivism. Few studies have generated the…

The ability to effectively navigate organizational politics to achieve one's goals has long been recognized as necessary for individuals to experience success within their organizations. Many studies have linked the effective use of political behaviors to increased individual performance. As such, many scholars within HRD and other disciplines…

Over the past decade much has been written by journalists, policy makers, and academics, about young women's leisure time pursuits. A great deal of this interest has focused around a concern that teenage girls in the UK are taking up smoking in larger numbers than their male peers. This paper draws on findings from my small-scale doctoral research…

Theoretical models to date have fallen short of accounting for the alarming worldwide rates of HIV infection in women through heterosexual contact. In this article, social dominance theory and the four bases of gendered power--force, resource control, social obligations, and consensual ideologies--are used to organize and explain international…

This urban synthesis paper encompasses the works of Drs. Joel Handler, Yeheskel Hasenfeld, Ann Winfield, John Rury, and Jean Anyon. The main purpose of this paper is to synthesize arguments contained within their books relating to the theory of power vs. oppression as it plays out within our society. This synthesizing acknowledges and elucidates…

Sociocultural theory is increasingly popular as a paradigm for research in education. A recent member in this family of theories is introduced--cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)--that shows much promise to complement and invigorate the field of educational change, a large, multi-faceted, and persistent problematic. In particular,…

Research suggests that females are vastly under-represented in the upper echelons of sport organizations. As such, the purpose of the current article was to apply a symbolic interactionist perspective to the lacking presence of women in leadership positions of sport organizations. The model proposes that gender-role meanings and stereotypes…

This paper conceives of a model of democracy that is tied up with narrative practices, and demonstrates how the initially democratic and radical auspices of one scholar's critique developed into a form of theory that was profoundly undemocratic in its narrative. The paper notes that the contemporary debate about power derives from a series of…

This article attempts to articulate in broad outline the post-industrial regime of knowledge and information and point out its fatal flaw. The Internet is treated as a socio-technological complex animated by capital and information. The notion of information is interrogated and an alternative notion closer to our everyday intuitions is proposed.…

Using Amitai Etzioni's (1961) sociological model as a basis for analysis, the paper examines the relationship between central student characters and their chief reference group or significant other(s) in the schools as portrayed in three films: "If" (1969), "Child's Play" (1972), and "Educating Rita" (1983). Two…

To clarify "power" and "authority," the authors review the concepts' history, examine contemporary concepts of social control, identify four authority modes (based on social relations and controls), derive four power resources from these modes, discuss persuasion and exchange as social control mechanisms, and demarcate…