Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
75
result(s) for
"Murji, Karim"
Sort by:
Race and place
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place.
Findings
The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociological work.
Originality/value
The Introduction sets the papers in context, providing a short account of each of them; it also aims to present an argument for attention to race and place in sociology in a setting characterized by racism and reaction.
Journal Article
Sociological Engagements: Institutional Racism and Beyond
The concept of institutional racism emerged in 1967, the same year that this journal began. This first part of the article traces the origins and context of the term in the black power movement of the 1960s. Its subsequent adoption by sociology shows its engagement with issues of race and racism, though sociology itself became the object of critique for its understanding and explanation of racial inequalities. Links and differences between the USA and Britain are used to reflect on the different public roles of their national sociological associations. The second section draws on the example of the Macpherson inquiry and its difficulty in conceptualizing institutional racism. This shows that sociology's public role is contested and that trying to develop a public voice through the media is challenging. Overall, while focusing on some of the problems for developing public sociology, the article argues that confronting such problems is essential for the vitality of the discipline.
Journal Article
A representative workforce: the BME police recruitment target and the politics of enumeration and categorisation
Purpose
To examine the inter-relationship between target setting, racial categories and racism via the case of a race employment target set for the police. Drawing on and extending public administration and governmentality perspectives, the work explores the shifting politics of enumeration and categorisation within a set of organisational manoeuvres.
Design/methodology/approach
The data is qualitative and mainly based on interviews with senior figures involved in managing the organisational response to the target, as well as some documentary sources.
Findings
The discussion reveals that both racial enumeration and categorisation are contested rather than fixed, but that debates about it ebb and flow in variable and uneven ways. They are the subject of manoeuvring around the number itself and of what counts as race. This indicates the complexity of governing race targets, which appear set but are made fluid in various ways.
Research limitations/implications
The research is based on interviews with senior and prominent figures involved in governance who spoke ‘off the record’, as described in the article. These conversations are not in the public domain and the justification for using them is that they reveal the thinking behind the public debate about the BME target, as well as a process of negotiation and manoeuvring.
Originality/value
The BME target has been the subject of considerable media and political attention, plus some academic research. The article presents a new and unique account of the target as it was implemented. It is of value to researchers interested in racism and policing interested in the organisational background that shaped the public debates about the target.
Journal Article
Hierarchies, Markets and Networks: Ethnicity/Race and Drug Distribution
Three models—hierarchies, markets, and networks—are used to explore the organization of drug distribution and the place of ethnicity/race in that. These models are well established as conceptual approaches to the coordination of social life. Each of them is employed in the analysis of drug distribution, though not always clearly. This paper aims to elucidate their key features as they bear on questions of ethnicity/race. In doing so, it problematizes the way that ethnicity/race is employed in research and policy circles and challenges naïve assumptions about ethnic sameness and ethnicity/race as bases for organizing drug distribution. Ethnicity may be a useful resource for criminal and legitimate enterprises but both comparisons between the two and details of what is specifically ethnic are generally lacking. Some avenues for future research and simple principles to guide such research are proposed.
Journal Article
Traffickers
Traffickers presents new findings into the most mythologised and least understood area of crime and law enforcement. The chamelion reality of the world of drug trafficking is described in the words of traffickers and detectives. Drug enforcement combines the banal and spectacular in surveillance, covert operations and criminal intelligence. The war on drugs is a harbinger of wider changes in the organisation of policing and international cooperation. Traffickers explores the struggle that transforms policing and punishment as it stimulates the imagination.
eBook
Applied Social Science? Academic Contributions to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and Their Consequences
A decade on from the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, this article examines the contributions of social scientists to the Inquiry on two key issues: the meaning of institutional racism and the police response to racial violence. These academic inputs are characterised as instrumental and reflexive forms of knowledge. While social science applied to social policy is most effective in instrumental mode, rather than reflexively, there are various factors – such as the interpretation of evidence, media debate and the role of prominent individuals – that are more significant in assessing its consequences. The impact of these factors mean that, although academic work on these issues has been influential, the outcome appears to be that institutional racism has run its course and been disowned or downgraded, while racial violence has become subsumed within the broader category of hate crime. It is argued that the relationship between academic knowledge and policy requires a better grasp of the complexities of applying social science, and that is what this article aims to make a contribution to.
Journal Article