Sanjoy Mazumdar

Sir, Please Do Not Take Away My Cubicle: The Phenomenon of Environmental Deprivation

Based on an ethnographic study of a work organization, from a microsocial ecological perspective, I describe a phenomenon I call environmental deprivation, its various conditions and effects, as well as the ways organizational members cope with it. The article concludes with a section on the pragmatic and policy implications of this study.

Religious Placemaking and Community Building in Diaspora

Community and loss of community have received much scholarly attention, whereas community formation and placemaking have been less well studied. Similarly, several studies have documented the role of religion in the lives of new immigrants, but little has been written about religious placemaking and community formation. Through an empirical study of a new immigrant group—the Hindus of Southern California—this article shows how religious placemaking helped build community. It details three salient components, namely, place planning and organization, place design, and place rituals, and also how these helped form and sustain community. It describes some challenges encountered and strategies used to negotiate, mitigate, or minimize them. In providing these delineations, it shows how religio loci and place nostalgia influenced and aided community building.

The Role of Place Identity in the Perception, Understanding, and Design of Built Environments

Description: In an era of globalization, where the progressive deterioration of local values is a dominating characteristic, identity is seen as a fundamental need that encompasses all aspects of human life. One of these identities relates to place and the physical environment. Place identity is concerned with a set of ideas about place and identity from the perspective of a wide range of disciplines. Mainly, it refers to the meaning and importance of places for their inhabitants and users. Readers of this e-book will gain an insight on the role of identity as a basis for the perception, experience, and appreciation of the form of built structures. This e-book explains knowledge in relation to place identity, focusing on peoples identity, and those factors that play a significant role in this process. Most of all, it enables to gain further insight about place identity with regard to global and local contexts, and across multifaceted and multicultural societies. The theme is approached from a number of disciplines that include environmental psychology, philosophy, urban sociology, geography, urban planning, urban design, architecture and landscape architecture.

How Organizations Interface with Religion: A Typology

In the West, institutions and businesses have for the most part been seen as secular and unconcerned with religion. Interestingly, our study reveals that religion has been present in organizations in several ways. How do organizations respond to religion? Based on our research, in this paper we present a four-part typology of the complex relationship between organizations and religion. These are religion dominated, religion included, religion accommodating, and religion insensitive organizations. We describe how these differing organizations interface with religion, examining the focus, attitudes of owners, employees, and client communities, the products and production processes, services, and the handling of religious activities, rituals, objects, and artifacts. We note that organizations interface with religion in overt and explicit ways and sometimes in subtle and nuanced ways. We conclude with a commentary on the ways religion in organizations have been viewed and identify a potentially useful line of future inquiry.

Case study method for research on disability

This paper investigates the case study as a research method. It examines its strengths, weaknesses, and criticisms. It describes important characteristics of the method and its important features, providing examples from the literature. It seeks to correct some misimpressions, and to point out overlooked potentials, new justifications, and further possibilities and directions. It points to features of the case study that would be particularly useful in studies of disability. The conclusion is that case studies, especially those focusing on verstehen and on special in-depth understanding, offer great potential in disability studies.

The Viability of Voluntary Visitability: A Case Study of Irvine's Approach

“Visitability,” or access for persons with disabilities, especially those using wheelchairs, to domestic buildings, such as houses and condominiums, is emerging as a matter requiring policy discussion, if not intervention and guidance. Few cities, counties, or states in the United States of America have policies in this area. Irvine, California, was an early jurisdiction to take up this concern and opted for a voluntary private initiative. This is a case study of visitability in Irvine. It reveals that the voluntary approach was not working as expected; few homebuyers were opting for the visitability features. In an unexpected positive development, builders began to voluntarily include several visitability components. This raises interesting questions regarding whether visitabilty ought to be a public policy, with regulatory force to compel compliance, or voluntary, and if the latter, who (builder or home buyer) should select which visitability elements to adopt, and how to address social equity and justice concerns.

Cultural Values in Architectural Education: An Example from India

Architectural education is not simply the imparting of knowledge and skills necessary for practice, but involves the development of values and philosophical positions. Based on an examination of an educational program in India, I argue that this program implemented a positivistic philosophical position and neglected viable and important alternate positions. This enabled the fledgling architects to form long-term attachments to global professional values and to the worldwide professional fraternity of architects, but it also distanced them from the potential occupants of the buildings, their social contexts, the local people, and their social and human problems. It established First World–Third World connections and became an instrument of cultural hegemony, subordinating multiple cultures and their values.

How programming can become counterproductive: An analysis of approaches to programming

I propose seeing environmental programming as varied and differentiated, and more specifically as having a diversity of approaches, which are best treated differently. I develop a typology of approaches to programming, based on the mode of data collection, analysis and presentation, and describe how their inherent assumptions, epistemological, ontological and methodological positions affect the efficacy of programming, often rendering it counterproductive to its original aim of assisting the designer in producing suitable physical environments. I discuss the implications of, and issues with, the different approaches to programming, and elaborate on the counterproductiveness of programming.

Stadium sightlines and wheelchair patrons: Case studies in implementation of the ADA

Title III of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act was passed to end discrimination against persons with disabilities, to provide “functional equality” and to make buildings accessible. This public policy was aimed at integrating persons with disabilities into the mainstream. But, persons with disabilities, “social watchdogs” and governmental agencies have had to go to court to ensure compliance from private and governmental organizations charged by law to supply the services.Through a study of two court cases, one involving the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., and the second the Rose Garden in Portland, Ore., we focus on public policy and its effectiveness and reach two major conclusions. First, we suggest that American public policy using law as an instrument can lead to vagueness in its formulation and ambiguity in its implementation. Second, we highlight the lessons that can be learned from a review of these court decisions and argue that persons concerned with shaping public policy have to attend assiduously to clarity in formulation of the law, the manner in which courts interpret laws and administrative guidelines, since this is often as much a political process as rote application of juridical principles and precedents.

Review: Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: A View from South India, by Harold Wilhite. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 205pp.

floating subject, the hyper-subject, the nonsubject, the anti-subject, and the survivorsubject. The floating subject lacks a space within which to act, or a project, such as a conflict, in which to engage. The hyper-subject finds a new space within which to act, one that contains an overabundance of meanings: fundamentalist religion is an important example. I found Wieviorka’s discussion of the floating subject and the hyper-subject to be high points of the book due to their contemporary global relevance. The non-subject is the player of roles, the follower of commands, and thus not a subject at all. The anti-subject, whose violence provides satisfaction and whose relationships are sadistic generally, denies the victim’s subjectivity. Finally, the survivor-subject perpetrates violence to defend his or her survival in the face of real or imagined danger. What is new about Wieviorka’s ‘‘new approach’’ to violence? His main innovation is to locate explicitly the grounds of violence in a nonor presocial phenomenon—the subject. (He rejects a Lacanian notion of the subject as constituted by a symbolic order.) In the first instance, the actor craves meaning: the desire for meaning precedes (social) meaning. Yet, Wieviorka insists that his theory is sociological because it could be applied to a project he does not take on: investigating the social conditions for different patterns of violence. The book, especially Part I, reads like explorations or spirited conversations with old ideas rather than a refutation of them: these conversations end untidily or not at all. Only the most advanced students in sociology and criminology courses will grasp what Wieviorka actually thinks about other perspectives on violence, for once and for all. But this is not a ‘‘for once and for all’’ sort of book. Part II likewise leaves certain matters untouched. For example, Wieviorka here deals little with the micro-macro (one might say, subject-subjects) relationship. How would he explain the ways in which the subject positions of many individuals culminate in mass violence, which is the most damaging sort? Do the various agents of genocide or terrorism occupy the same subject position, if only in the notional stages of their attack? What about the subject positions of leaders versus followers? Whereas Wieviorka considers state violence, including ‘‘illegitimate’’ violence, in Chapter Two, such violence is actually hard to reconcile with his own theory. If he attended to the role of government in much of today’s mass violence, he would have to grapple with synergies among subject positions and meanings. Notwithstanding such unfinished business, Wieviorka’s book is as lucid and thoughtful as any that has been written on the topic of violence. His idea of the ‘‘non-subject’’ will stimulate discussion of the nature of agency. His ‘‘anti-subject’’ will be used to scrutinize the relation between meaning-making about the self and the other. His view of the essential mystery of extreme violence will give pause to those of us who try to get to the bottom of it.