In the last year, three respected leaders in academic advising, Wes Habley, Terry Kuhn, and Gary Padak, published articles suggesting that academic advising has not met the standards of scholarship to be considered a field of inquiry, an academic discipline, or a profession. In this article, we examine academic advising history from the perspective of the discipline of sociology, through which scholars systematically study the processes whereby activities are transformed from occupations into professions. Indeed, we agree that academic advising has not met the typical sociological standards that accompany societal recognition for a profession, and we suggest that strengthened advisor education and credentialing are the steps necessary to secure public recognition of academic advising as a profession.

Despite constituting only a small fraction of all psychiatrists, psychoanalysts rose to a position of dominance within American psychiatry in the post-World War Two era. This article explains their success. A review of the social and institutional context of psychoanalysis and psychiatry reveals that many factors were actually unfavorable to psychoanalysis, and several others were at best equivocal in their support of analysis. Neither income, status, the relationship between institutions and ideology, or other such factors accounts for the success. After describing these factors and showing how they do not work as explanations, I argue that psychoanalysis succeeded largely because of its utility to the psychiatric profession in the growing jurisdictional disputes with non-medical competitors, specifically clinical psychology.

This article provides a dialectical materialist examination of the production and use of the concepts of discretion and institutional discrimination within the criminal courts. It is argued that existing Marxist accounts of discretion and discrimination, and the recommendations stemming from these, rely upon theoretical orientations that are insufficiently materialistic and processual in orientation. The U.S. Supreme Court case of McCleskey v. Georgia is presented here to illustrate the contradictions that spawned, and are spawned by, the production and use of these concepts. Contradictions related to the construction of the subject are identified as essential to the understanding of these dynamics. The essay concludes by offering a materialist recommendation that judicial discretion should be supported and institutional discrimination should be rejected.

This essay examines the relationships between tropic strategies used in the construction of the self in the human sciences, in the humanities, and in culture and the political and social context within which the specific strategies arise and are maintained. Three specific tropic strategies are identified -reductionist, structuralist, humanist/anti-humanist. These are shown to rely upon three of the master tropes identified by Kenneth Burke. Two specific contextual factors are shown to nurture the use of one or another tropic strategy. One of these is the overarching historic trend of the disembeddedness of the world. The other factor consists of the lived social realities within bureaucratic and institutional settings. It is argued that there are many forces promoting reductionist strategies, including the overall disembedding of the world, however many of these forces also foster competing and contradictory strategies. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute.

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