Think Local, Act Global: A Call to Recognize Competing, Cultural Scripts

Haley, Usha C. V.; Haley, George T.

doi:10.1017/mor.2016.1

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…We will see that the precise nature of the most salient local obstacles Chinese divorce seekers face is difficult to discern using macrocomparative crossnational research designs common to this literature. In contrast to sociological research in the third literature emphasizing the role of exogenous models, templates, scripts, and blueprints (Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer 2000;Frank, Camp, and Boutcher 2010;Frank and Moss 2017), a fourth literature brings into high relief the less obvious endogenous forces that animate organizational behavior (Heimer 1999;Wimmer 2001;Merry 2006;Dezalay and Garth 2010;Hallett 2010;Pache and Santos 2013;Raynard, Lounsbury, and Greenwood 2013;Bartley and Egels-Zandén 2016;Edelman 2016;Haley and Haley 2016;Bartley 2018). 2 This fourth literature eschews efforts to draw macroscopic generalizations from superficial country-level indicators and points instead to in-depth, nuanced, contextually specific scrutiny of local processes animating organizational behavior as a potentially fruitful means of explaining the puzzle of decoupling (pun intended) in China's civil courts.…”

Section: How Marital Decoupling Informs Theories Of Institutional Decouplingmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…China thus offers an opportunity to assess directly the relative importance of competing norms and practices-some consistent with and some antithetical to world society models. Scholars in the world society tradition, sometimes referred to as the "Stanford school of sociological institutionalism" (True and Mintrom 2001;Haley and Haley 2016), focus on the "strong commonalities in international discourses on a wide range of topics, from human rights to environmentalism" (Schofer et al 2012, p. 59). To borrow the conceptual language of Heimer (1999) and Edelman (2016), we will see that China's domestic fault-based standards consistent with world society norms are "symbolic laws" containing "symbolic rights" that, in a twist of tragic irony, have largely failed to penetrate its own civil courts, whereas the routine practice of using a countervailing no-fault standard to deny the petitions of plaintiffs seeking to dissolve abusive marriages has largely stuck.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

Michelson

2019

American Journal of Sociology

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An analysis of adjudicated divorce decisions in two Chinese provinces reveals the extent to which and the reasons why Chinese courts subvert the global legal norms they symbolically embrace. In China, uncontested no-fault divorces are readily attainable outside the court system. Courts, by contrast, granted divorces in fewer than half of the cases they adjudicated. Despite an abundance of formal legal mechanisms designed to provide relief to victims of marital abuse, a plaintiff's claim of domestic violence did not increase the probability a court granted a divorce request. Chinese courts' highly institutionalized practice of denying first-attempt divorce petitions and granting divorces on subsequent litigation attempts disproportionately impacts women and has spawned a sizable population of female marital-violence refugees. These findings carry substantive and theoretical implications concerning the limits and possibilities of the local penetration of global legal norms.A 27-year-old female plaintiff from a village in Huojia County, Henan Province, seeking to divorce her husband in court supported her claim of marital abuse with medical documentation showing a diagnosis of a vertebral fracture. In his defense statement, her husband rebutted, "I did not beat the 1 This research came to fruition only because of the generous support of Benjamin Liebman, Rachel Stern, and Alice Wang, who collected and shared the raw data from Henan Province. I am grateful to Ke Li, my former student, for reversing roles and teaching me much about Chinese divorce litigation and serving as a critically helpful sounding board as I worked through the data. All errors are my own. Hai Hu and Zuoyu Tian provided key technical assistance with the collection and preparation of data.

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Section: How Marital Decoupling Informs Theories Of Institutional Decouplingmentioning

confidence: 98%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

Michelson

2019

American Journal of Sociology

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“…This typical example illustrates a cultural script, because it is embedded in a culture that creates the objects and situations that make up the script and prescribes (sometimes enforces) the norms individuals must follow to play a role in the script (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2004 ; Goddard, 2009 ; Haley and Haley, 2016 ; Constant et al, 2019 ). This does not mean that all scripts are cultural.…”

Section: Cultural Scripts In Ecological-enactivist Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

Albarracin

Poirier

2022

Front. Psychol.

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This paper aims to show that genders are enacted, by providing an account of how an individual can be said to enact a gender and explaining how, consequently, genders can be fluid. On the enactive-ecological view we defend, individuals first and foremost perceive the world as fields of affordances, that is, structured sets of action possibilities. Fields of natural affordances offer action possibilities because of the natural properties of organisms and environments. Handles offer graspability to humans because of physical-structural properties of handles and the anatomical-physiological properties of humans. Although humans live in fields of bodily, action, and cultural affordances, our work focuses on cultural affordances, where action possibilities are offered to individuals because of the normative responses of individuals in that culture. Knocking on a door affords entrance because knocking provides cultured individuals on the other side of the door an affordance to which they themselves behave normatively. Usually, behaving normatively in response to cultural affordances brings about sequences of perception-action loops, which we will call “scripts”: for instance, closed doors afford knocking, which affords the individual inside opening the door, which affords an interpersonal meeting, which (may) afford entrance. Although the notion of script has a strong cognitivist flavor, one of the aims of the paper to provide an ecological account of scripts, to show that what cognitivists viewed as representations (or representational structures) are in fact environmentally structured perception-action loops. On our account of gender, gendered cultures build and maintain gendered cultural affordance landscapes, that is, landscapes in which the action possibilities individuals face are normed according to a specific body type or situation; most often (assigned) biological sex. Individuals enact a given gender when they come to perceive the affordances reserved for one gender by their culture and respond in the culturally normative way, thus enacting gendered sequences of perception-action loops (i.e., gendered scripts). With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by several recent social, technological, and epistemic developments in some cultures, the gendered landscapes of affordances offered to individuals in these cultures have become more varied and less rigid, thus increasing the variety and flexibility of scripts individuals can enact. This entails that individuals in such cultures have an increased possibility for gender fluidity, which may in part explain the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary.

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Local variation in world society: six characteristics of global diffusion

Pope

Meyer

2016

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

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Think Local, Act Global: A Call to Recognize Competing, Cultural Scripts

Cited by 5 publications

References 22 publications

Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

Local variation in world society: six characteristics of global diffusion

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