Expressing Anxiety? Breast pump usage in American wage workplaces

This article considers the potential and problems for women seeking to combine breastfeeding with wage labor outside the home through the use of breast pumps. After locating the breast pump within cultural, historical and legislative contexts of shifting views about infant nutrition on the one hand and trends in women's participation in the wage work force on the other, we unpack how this technology has re-shaped the landscape of choices about infant feeding in the United States. Using disciplinary lenses of science and technology studies, feminist geography and women's studies, we examine how the breast pump has reshaped workplace experiences after childbirth. Based on interviews and survey data with respondents in Albany, New York across a range of class and racial backgrounds, we submit that while the breast pump does allow some women to combine breastfeeding and wage work outside the home, the advantages of breast pumps are constrained both by cultural attitudes about pumping as an activity, the lack of a sufficient legislative framework, as well as by the way workplaces themselves are designed.     

Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909

Starting from the idea that race is an assemblage, the author investigates two instances of touch in anthropometry. Firstly, the detailed instructions for mechanized measurements of “the living”. Second, the practices involved in actual measurements of Papuans in Dutch New Guinea during two expeditions in 1903 and 1909.     

Healthy discretion? Breastfeeding and the mutual maintenance of motherhood and public space

Although idealizations of motherhood are ever in flux, specific historical moments can be said to produce distinctive tropes of ‘good’ motherhood that have very real impacts on how women act and conceptualize themselves as mothers. This article examines good motherhood in its current iteration, and how now-common beliefs about breastfeeding are implicated in its construction. Furthermore, it looks at the ways in which idealizations of motherhood discipline the breastfeeding body so that it will fit into public space without disruption. I discuss the contradictory impacts of characterizations of the good mother as they appeared in the pro-breastfeeding dialogs that arose following a 2007 incident in which a mother was asked to cover herself up while nursing in a Kentucky restaurant. I posit that while these characterizations helped to make breastfeeding a more widely accepted public activity, they also had the effect of reifying a very narrow conception of what it means to be a good mother. I make this claim through an analysis of two common refrains heard in pro-public-breastfeeding arguments: breast milk is exceedingly healthy and mothers should not be persecuted if they nurse discreetly. Although these assertions together are compelling to the general public in that they provide a scientific justification for breastfeeding while at once assuaging fears of discomfort presented by a reproductive act being performed in a public space, I suggest that they also work to discipline women and maintain public-space-as-usual.     

Shifting Winds: Explaining Variation in State Policies to Promote Small‐Scale Wind Energy

States have increasingly taken leading roles in U.S. environmental policymaking over the past two decades. As laboratories of democracy, states have developed different levels and mixes of policies to address climate change, nonpoint source pollution, alternative energy, and other challenging environmental issues. Policy scholars have sought to explain variation in state environmental policy through two primary theoretical lenses: internal determinants and regional diffusion. While our understanding of state environmental policy adoption has grown to identify which variables are most important, less is known about how these variables interact in particular states to influence policy adoption. This study examines the interactions of variables from both theories to explain how state policies for small‐scale wind energy promotion were adopted in three U.S. states. Our results highlight the nuanced role of citizen ideology, which may be important in contexts at either end of the ideological spectrum but less important in the middle—where economic development is more critical. Results also indicate that interstate competition may be over environmental as well as economic leadership. Interestingly, strength of the wind resource is not necessarily correlated with policy adoption for small‐scale wind energy promotion.     

Policy Coherence and Policy Domains

Policy scholars generally agree that greater coherence of policies is desirable, but the concept is under-theorized and has received little empirical examination. This research examines the policy coherence of 18 policy domains and considers institutional factors that affect variation among them. There is considerable variation in coherence among substantive, regional, and identity-based policy domains. Greater degrees of policy coherence exist for policy domains that have dominant congressional committees or have more involvement of lead federal agencies. These findings extend what policy scholars know about policy subsystems in American policymaking to consideration of the coherence of policy domains.     

Is Morality Policy Different? Testing Sectoral and Institutional Explanations of Policy Change

We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctuated. Finally, and most importantly, we show that the degree of policy punctuations varies between different domains of morality policy, but not according to institutional features operating on the country level, supporting existing PET research, which has discovered similar domain‐specific dynamics in changes of public spending. Specifically, punctuations are particularly pronounced in areas of manifest morality policy, that is, policies characterized by strong value conflicts, whereas punctuations are less pronounced for latent morality policies, that is, policies in which other dimensions of conflict are present next to the value dimension. Significant differences in reform dynamics are neither discerned for countries belonging to the religious or the secular world, nor for countries with majoritarian or consensual democracies. The analysis relies on an original dataset capturing legislative changes in five manifest (abortion, euthanasia, prostitution, pornography, and homosexuality), and three latent morality policies (drugs, gambling, and handguns) in 19 European countries (1960–2010).     

Political Power and Policy Design: Why Are Policy Alternatives Constrained?

Little research examines the stage of the policy process during which policy alternatives are formulated. Using quantitative and qualitative data from Swedish local politics, we address this deficiency by analyzing the process by which the number of specific policy alternatives is reduced. The findings suggest that, in approximately 20 percent of issues, more than one alternative will reach all politicians making the binding decisions. Most local politicians, in both the majority and opposition factions, think that they lack sufficient information on alternative policy designs. We also find a “political bias,” that is, alternatives are discarded at an early stage because they are deemed not politically feasible. Politicians outside the inner circles, especially those with higher education, would like to see more policy alternatives to discuss and from which they can make choices.