Jason Rodriquez

Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop

This article examines how white youths culturally appropriate hip-hop by adhering to the demands of color-blind ideology. Using ethnographic methods and interviews of members in a local hip-hop scene, I argue that colorblind ideology provides whites with the discursive resources to justify their presence in the scene, and more important, to appropriate hip-hop by removing the racially coded meanings embedded in the music and replacing them with color-blind ones. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on racial ideology by analyzing how it is put into action by individuals in a specific local context in which race is salient. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of how color-blind ideology operates in practice, enabling whites with the discursive resources and racial power to culturally appropriate hip-hop, however unintentionally, for their own purposes.

Narrating Dementia: Self and Community in an Online Forum

In this article, I examine how individuals diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease use illness narratives to construct community. The ability to narrate is a fundamental component of the self. Using 354 posts by 32 members of an Internet forum, I argue that people with Alzheimer’s, whose ability to narrate, and thus create a self, was compromised, nonetheless managed to tell stories of redemption out of which a salvaged self emerged. Narratives are essential for the construction of self, but as I show in this article, they are also essential for the construction of community. Forum members shared stories, gave advice, offered encouragement, and commiserated about their symptoms in ways that generated solidarity. Internet forums provide a venue for people with illnesses who are unable to leave the home to construct community.

Attributions of Agency and the Construction of Moral Order: Dementia, Death, and Dignity in Nursing-home Care.

Using evidence gathered during 18 months of participant-observation in 2 nursing homes and 65 interviews with staff, this article examines how nursing-home staff use agency as a rhetorical resource to construct a dignified workplace. Staff attribute agency to dying residents, saying they choose the timing and conditions of their death. Staff equally insist that aggressive residents do not have agency. These two sets of attributions are used as counterpoints. Both go well beyond the available facts of the situation and reflect unspoken assumptions and interests of nursing-care workers. Through these attributions, the staff achieves a situated moral order in which compassionate care is provided to deserving residents in caring nursing homes. Staff attributions of agency are collectively shaped by professional philosophies, training and education, and regulatory guidelines. Finally, this article shows how it is analytically and theoretically productive to recast agency as a cultural object, whose use is subject to empirical investigation, rather than as a theoretical construct.

Implementing the MOLST (medical orders for life-sustaining treatments): Challenges faced by nursing home staff

ABSTRACT This study examined how the Medical Orders for Life‐sustaining Treatment (MOLST) is implemented in two nursing homes in Massachusetts; one had primarily long‐term care residents and high hospice utilization, the other had low hospice utilization and a high proportion of post‐acute care residents. Qualitative in‐person interviews with 21 staff members who had a role implementing the MOLST explored their experiences using the form in their daily work routines. Staff at both nursing homes described benefits of the MOLST such as providing guidance for staff and family. Yet, they also gave detailed accounts of challenges they face in implementing the form. They reported problems with the form itself such as confusing language and conflicting categories as well as a set of procedural challenges that undermined the timely completion of the form. The nursing home with more post‐acute care residents faced more challenges with transferability of the MOLST to and from hospitals.

Social and organizational practices that influence hospice utilization in nursing homes

Hospice has grown considerably but the likelihood that someone gets hospice depends on social and organizational practices. This article shows how staff beliefs and work routines influenced hospice utilization in two nursing homes. In one, 76% of residents died on hospice and in the other 24% did. Staff identified barriers to hospice including families who saw hospice as giving up and gaps in the reimbursement system. At the high-hospice nursing home, staff said hospice care extended beyond what they provided on their own. At the low-hospice nursing home, an influential group said hospice was essentially the same as their own end-of-life care and therefore needlessly duplicative. Staff at the high-hospice nursing home proactively approached families about hospice, whereas staff at the low-hospice nursing home took a reactive approach, getting hospice when families asked for it. Findings demonstrate how staff beliefs and practices regarding hospice shape end-of-life care in nursing homes.

Doing More with Less: Intensive Care and the Logic of Flexible Teamwork

This article examines how a profit-centered restructuring of labor relations in an academic medical center undermined team-based care practices in its intensive care unit. The Institute of Medicine has promoted team-based care to improve patient outcomes, and the staff in the intensive care unit researched for this paper had established a set of practices they defined as teamwork. After hospital executives rolled out a public relations campaign to promote its culture of teamwork, they restructured its workforce to enhance numerical and functional flexibility in three key ways: implementing a “service line” managerial structure; cutting a range of staff positions while combining others; and doubling the capacity of its profitable and highly regarded intensive care unit. Hospital executives said the restructuring was necessitated by changes to payment models brought forth by the Affordable Care Act. Based on 300 hours of participant-observation and 35 interviews with hospital staff, findings show that the restructuring lowered staff resources and intensified work, which limited their ability to practice care they defined as teamwork and undermined the unit’s collective identity as a team. Findings also show how staff members used teamwork as a sensitizing concept to make sense of what they did at work. The meanings attached to teamwork were anchored to positions in the hospitals’ organizational hierarchy. This paper advances our understanding of he flexible work arrangements in the health care industry and their effects on workers.

Living with Alzheimer’s: Managing Memory Loss, Identity, and IllnessLiving with Alzheimer’s: Managing Memory Loss, Identity, and Illness, by BeardRenée L.New York: New York University Press, 2016. 323 pp.

tics, or at least as an outsider, ready to conquer rather than to govern, to rule rather than to represent the institutions that he despises’’ (pp. 22, 23). Wow. Who says that the social sciences cannot predict? Beyond successful prediction, there is something here about the underlying conditions for and forms taken by populism that is very insightful. While the first chapter (pp. 5–44) was the most powerful for me, the other two deepen the analysis. The second chapter, entitled ‘‘Inside a changing social space,’’ ranges over a number of issues. It starts with the growing inequality that again is a worldwide phenomenon and that threatens to turn voters into spectators. It speaks of routine government invocations of the TINA principle (There Is No Alternative); the replacement of substantive talk with spectacle; and the reduction of culture to burlesque. Chapter Three, ‘‘Interconnected Loners,’’ focuses on our collective responsibility going forward. Responsibility, Bauman and Mauro say, ‘‘was once a concept of modernity.’’ Yes, before postmodernism and its poststructuralist successor reduced us to subject positions or before all conscious thought was otherwise demoted to habitus. But, say Bauman and Mauro, ‘‘without a duty to select and decide, the citizen is truly a spectator, perfectly free, finally ‘innocent’, in that he is not bound to causes or accountable for consequences’’ (p. 83). There is in this chapter considerable meandering from this theme in rather jumbled commentary on ‘‘flows,’’ the internet, and loss of history; and the twoand-a-half page epilogue was a bit too highflown for me to make much sense of. Still I appreciated the main point here. Is this social science? Where is (are) the data? If data is (are) your thing, this book is not for you. If, however, you want a brief book with gripping language on important ideas to stimulate discussion in your classroom, then I recommend the book. I certainly am thinking of using it myself. Living with Alzheimer’s: Managing Memory Loss, Identity, and Illness, by Renée L. Beard. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 323 pp.

30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479889808.

30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479889808.