Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography Industry
Abstract
The idea of 'pornography' is often employed to invoke titillation, anger, and disgust. Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography Industry explores the effects that this stigmatized identity has on the pornography industry itself. From the video era to the emergence of the internet, to trade shows, white-collar workers, technological innovation, and industry-wide characteristics, this book looks beyond content production to explore how stigma has shaped the structures, practices, norms, and boundaries of the wider sector. By drawing on concepts such as dirty work, core-stigmatized industries, and outlaw innovation, this book offers rich insights into the ways in which stigma is socially constructed and managed, and the deep structural effects that it has on the industry.
... Prior research has explored the strategies that entrepreneurs can use to respond to stigma. For instance, they can (1) cope with stigma (Hudson and Okhuysen, 2009;Vergne, 2012;Voss, 2015), (2) leverage stigma (Coslor et al., 2020;Helms and Patterson, 2014;Ruebottom and Toubiana, 2021), or (3) challenge stigma (Hampel and Tracey, 2017;Slade Shantz et al., 2019;Werner et al., 2023). Concerning the latter, entrepreneurs who successully redene the cultural relevance o their products and services can reduce or even eliminate stigma and gain legitimacy or their products with mainstream audiences (Aranda et al., 2023;Hampel and Tracey, 2017;Slade Shantz et al., 2019). ...
... We researched the sex toy industry, where entrepreneurs have historically conronted challenges due to the stigma attached to the products that activate, enable, and enhance sexual pleasure (Hudson and Okhuysen, 2009;Piha et al., 2018;Voss, 2015). Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable shit in this industry-sex toys (especially those aimed at women) are now being sold in mainstream retail stores such as Sephora and Urban Outtters; are being presented at conerences such as CES (ormerly Consumer Electronics Show); and are being proled in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times and Forbes. ...
... In all the cases we analyzed, the entrepreneurs visibilized their historically marginalized bodies. Leveraging them as a cultural resource, the entrepreneurs becoming visible in contrast to the tendency o entrepreneurs in sex-related industries to remain concealed in order to dodge negative scrutiny (or other examples, see Hudson and Okhuysen, 2009;Voss, 2015). An industry veteran we interviewed revealed: 'I you try and get in touch with the ounders o some o these older companies, they-re very hands-o. ...
... Of particular note here is that, while respondents felt an open discussion of porn and sexuality tended to help them reconcile feelings of conflict that they may have experienced between their feminisms and their porn use, opportunities and spaces for these conversations to take place were identified as scarce. This appears reflective of the ways in which pornography and the sex industry have come to be seen as socially and morally tainted (Neal, 2018;Scambler, 2007;Voss, 2015) and of the development of widespread social taboos around sexuality (Kirkman et al., 2005). All participants perceived and commented upon this type of stigma, often attributing it to social and religious values: "The biggest religions in the world today are demonising sexuality and sex and, I don't know, pleasure in opposition to . . . ...
... Adding detail to these speculation, Voss (2015) attributes the dearth of accessible data about pornography businesses to the fact that so few adult entertainment enterprises actually operate as public companies. She goes on to assert that this opacity is facilitated by stigmatisation, and the resultant challenges that "whore stigma" poses for porn performers wishing to speak out about employer malpractice. ...
... Given the valiant efforts participants often described with regards to combatting stigma and opening up difficult conversations around porn, it is thus surprising that many expressed reluctance to engage with performers' requests that consumers pay for their work. This is particularly the case given recent developments within the industry -such as the creation of trade organisations and dualpurpose technologies designed to help assuage concerns around payment and access (Voss, 2015) -which some participants cited as barriers to action. ...
This paper presents findings from a grounded theory study of consumer ethics among feminists who use porn. It presents a range of exogenous and endogenous factors reported to be influential on ethical decision-making in this context and demonstrates how such factors may be perceived as impeding or facilitating the types of behaviour that consumers consider to be more in keeping with their moral and political beliefs. It furthermore highlights how such influences are often undergirded by seemingly deep-seated stigma around pornography, and often around sex and sexuality at large. The paper concludes that the direct and indirect effects of stigma may present additional obstacles for “fairtrade” and feminist-branded porn projects seeking to leverage consumer demand to support the development of more ethical industry practices. While it has been argued that stigma-reduction efforts can help reduce exploitative practices in the porn industry – by improving sex workers’ ability to demand rights, freedoms, safety, and better labour conditions and remuneration – the analysis from this study suggests that such efforts may also result in secondary benefits. These may be brought about by (a) removing obstacles to the types of consumer practice that could in turn support worker rights and livelihoods, and (b) disrupting rationalisations used to justify consumer choices that threaten to undermine these ends.
... Helms and Patterson's (2014) study of mixed martial arts (MMA) is an example of organizations contaminated by physical stigma (i.e., MMA fighters' appearances, and the physical harm and blood caused during fights). Physical stigma is also attached to strip clubs Mavin & Grandy, 2013), brothels (Blithe & Wolfe, 2017;Wolfe & Blithe, 2015), and other sex-orientated organizations and industries (Coslor, Crawford, & Brents, 2020;Tyler, 2011;Voss, 2015). and to the niche market that sells cadavers and body parts (Anteby, 2010). ...
... Importantly, the six sources are not mutually exclusive and are often combined. For example, the pornography industry's stigma is derived from physical, moral, and servile sources (Voss, 2015), and the stigma of MMA arises from a combination of physical and moral sources (Helms & Patterson, 2014). Most significantly, these sources provide us with a framework by which to consider the causes of stigma. ...
... Yet, while we can speculate on how certain combinations of characteristics, sources, and stigma-management strategies may influence the process and effectiveness of destigmatization, these are empirical questions that are ripe for exploration. For instance, is it easier to reduce stigmatization of employees working in a rape crisis center (an uncontrollable, emotional stigma [see Zilber, 2002]) than that of individuals working in slaughterhouses or brothels (a controllable, moral stigma [see Baran et al., 2016;Voss, 2015])? And, if so, why? ...
Stigma has become an increasingly significant challenge for society. Recognition of this problem is indicated by the growing attention to it within the management literature which has provided illuminating insights. However, stigma has primarily been examined at a single level of analysis: individual, occupational, organizational, or industry. Yet, cultural understandings of what is discreditable or taboo do not come from the individual, occupation, organization, or industry that is stigmatized; on the contrary, they come from particular sources that transcend levels. As such, we propose that current silos within the literature may not only be preventing engagement with insights from different levels of analysis, but, importantly, may be preventing us from truly understanding stigmatization as a social process. To address this issue, we review the stigma literature and then present an across level integrative framework of the sources, characteristics, and management strategies. Our framework provides a common language that integrates insights across these levels and enables a shift in attention from how actors respond to stigma to broader processes of stigmatization.
... Of particular note here is that, while respondents felt an open discussion of porn and sexuality tended to help them reconcile feelings of conflict that they may have experienced between their feminisms and their porn use, opportunities and spaces for these conversations to take place were identified as scarce. This appears reflective of the ways in which pornography and the sex industry have come to be seen as socially and morally tainted (Scambler, 2007;Voss, 2015;Neal, 2018) and of the development of widespread social taboos around sexuality (Kirkman et al. 2005). All participants perceived and commented upon this type of stigma, often attributing it to social and religious values: ...
... Adding detail to these speculation, Voss (2015) attributes the dearth of accessible data about pornography businesses to the fact that so few adult entertainment enterprises actually operate as public companies. She goes on to assert that this opacity is facilitated by stigmatisation, and the resultant challenges that "whore stigma" poses for porn performers wishing to speak out about employer malpractice. ...
... Given the valiant efforts participants often described with regards to combatting stigma and opening up difficult conversations around porn, it is thus surprising that many expressed reluctance to engage with performers' requests that consumers pay for their work. This is particularly the case given recent developments within the industrysuch as the creation of trade organisations and dual-purpose technologies designed to help assuage concerns around payment and access (Voss, 2015) -which some participants cited as barriers to action. ...
This paper presents findings from a grounded theory study of consumer ethics among feminists who use porn. It presents a range of exogenous and endogenous factors reported to be influential on ethical decision-making in this context and demonstrates how such factors may be perceived as impeding or facilitating the types of behaviour that consumers consider to be more in keeping with their moral and political beliefs. It furthermore highlights how such influences are often undergirded by seemingly deep-seated stigma around pornography, and often around sex and sexuality at large.
The paper concludes that the direct and indirect effects of stigma may present additional obstacles for “fairtrade” and feminist-branded porn projects seeking to leverage consumer demand to support the development of more ethical industry practices. While it has been argued that stigma-reduction efforts can help reduce exploitative practices in the porn industry – by improving sex workers’ ability to demand rights, freedoms, safety, and better labour conditions and remuneration – the analysis from this study suggests that such efforts may also result in secondary benefits. These may be brought about by (a) removing obstacles to the types of consumer practice that could in turn support worker rights and livelihoods, and (b) disrupting rationalisations used to justify consumer choices that threaten to undermine these ends.
... Category stigma reduction has received limited attention in the organizational stigma literature (Adams, 2012). 1 Instead, scholars have typically focused on how firms in stigmatized industries act independently to manage the effects of the stigma through practices such as shielding, straddling, or co-opting. They shield to protect important stakeholders from the negative effects of the stigma (Hudson and Okhuysen, 2009), they straddle multiple categories to divert attention from the stigmatized category (Vergne, 2012;Voss, 2015), and they co-opt negative labels to strategically use their stigma to galvanize support from those with similar values (Helms and Patterson, 2014). But this stream of research has not considered the category-level implications of organizations' independent actions and whether their efforts to manage stigma at the organization level reduce, perpetuate, or even worsen the overall category's stigma. ...
... In other words, the categorical nature of stigma ''links an organization to a negatively evaluated category of organizations collectively perceived by a specific stakeholder group as having values that are expressly counter to its own'' (Devers et al., 2009: 157). Audiences' negative perceptions of a category will often dominate any positive perceptions (Voss, 2015), and they are motivated to distance themselves from stigmatized industry categories to avoid having the stigma transfer to themselves (Vergne, 2012). Furthermore, audiences often disidentify from (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, 2001) and impose sanctions on organizations in stigmatized categories (Sutton and Callahan, 1987), making it difficult for them to hire employees, attract customers, secure financing (Deephouse and Suchman, 2008;Hudson, 2008;Vergne, 2012;Voss, 2015), and gain or maintain legitimacy (Piazza and Perretti, 2015). ...
... Audiences' negative perceptions of a category will often dominate any positive perceptions (Voss, 2015), and they are motivated to distance themselves from stigmatized industry categories to avoid having the stigma transfer to themselves (Vergne, 2012). Furthermore, audiences often disidentify from (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, 2001) and impose sanctions on organizations in stigmatized categories (Sutton and Callahan, 1987), making it difficult for them to hire employees, attract customers, secure financing (Deephouse and Suchman, 2008;Hudson, 2008;Vergne, 2012;Voss, 2015), and gain or maintain legitimacy (Piazza and Perretti, 2015). Ultimately, stigma can stifle markets (Chan, 2009;Anteby, 2010;Livne, 2014), making it important for these firms to confront the stigma. ...
When a new industry category is predicated on a product or activity subject to “core” stigma—meaning its very nature is stigmatized—the actors trying to establish it may struggle to gain the resources they need to survive and grow. To explain the process of reducing an industry category’s stigma, we take an inductive approach to understanding how actors in the U.S. medical cannabis industry collectively attempted to create and disseminate a moral public image based on healing and patients’ rights. We find that reducing category-level core stigma is a phased effort that takes place across different relational spaces. A moral agenda based on broadly acceptable values jumpstarts the process, and the industry then creates a new moral prototype reflecting these values that industry actors can identify with. Category members must publicly disidentify with the current, stigmatized prototypes and infuse the new moral prototype among their stakeholder audiences through their language and practices, creating emotional connections that lead to cognitive acceptance. This process is messy, as individual organizations often need to continue engaging in stigmatized behaviors to survive, even as they publicly disidentify with them. Our process model also identifies ways in which category emergence in core-stigmatized categories differs from the process for non-stigmatized categories.
... Advocates of the antipornography movement typically encounter less discrimination and opposition, aligning with prevalent cultural standards. Conversely, their opponents, including sex workers, LGBTQ individuals, and nonconforming members, often face greater challenges (Voss, 2015). Recognizing the uneven playing field in discussions on sex underscores that the underlying purpose of the debate transcends specific issues-it is about the shared goal of leading fulfilling and authentic lives (Moussawi & Vidal-Ortiz, 2020). ...
... In this context, pornography has been linked to transgression and has acquired a taboo connotation (Hester, 2014). Despite the passage of several decades since pornography was condemned in the harshest terms and the changes it has undergone over time, particularly due to the rapid evolution of the internet and digital technologies, it continues to be associated with stigma and shame (Macleod, 2021;Voss, 2015). ...
Understanding the psychological conflicts associated with pornography consumption can help professionals tailor their interventions to address the mental health risks faced by individuals struggling with issues related to their pornography use. The main objective of this research was to investigate how pornography consumers are perceived from a social representation theoretical perspective and to examine variations in these perceptions—or social representations—according to gender, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction. All participants (N = 875 Romanians) were in a romantic relationship at the time of participation. Our results indicated that the social representation of pornography consumers varied significantly depending on gender, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction. Also, our findings showed a potential psychological conflict in the long run, which can put individuals at risk for self-stigma, guilt, and subsequent mental health consequences. We discuss conclusions from both a theoretical and practical perspective, with a focus on the utility of our conclusions in the clinical practice context of psychologists, psychotherapists, and mental health workers when dealing with issues related to pornography use.
... The core idea is that organizations also may be subject to stigma from various sources, including when their ethical misconduct denotes a moral breach (Piazza and Jourdan, 2018) or when bankruptcy or other indicators of incompetence expose failures in their pragmatic functions (Wiesenfeld, Wurthmann, and Hambrick, 2008). Moreover, whole categories of organizations can be stigmatized, with each organization being subject to stigma due to its association with a contested market, such as firearms, pornography, or alcohol (Galvin, Ventresca, and Hudson, 2004;Voss, 2015). Such category-level stigma can suppress large zones of social and economic activity. ...
We seek to understand the distinctive process of state-led category destigmatization, extending an emergent stream of research on category destigmatization that has so far focused on the efforts of stigmatized members of categories. When a category conflicts with a prevailing ideology, internal actors may face such substantial barriers to destigmatization that the state—often motivated by the pragmatic benefits of that category’s success—must take a proactive role in the effort. Focusing on an extreme case, we explore the revival of the private business category in China through a longitudinal case study. We develop a grounded process model that highlights the interplay among the state, category members, and the public as a framework for understanding this type of destigmatization process. Our model also addresses dynamics that can emerge within the state when political power is divided between category proponents and opponents with competing ideological stances. Our study highlights the need for the state to balance destigmatization efforts with maintaining legitimacy, prompting iterative strategic adjustments based on local feedback, evolving public opinion, and intrastate competition between political factions. Our findings show that such adjustments may be needed even in authoritarian states, which are typically more coercive. In addition, we find that states can effectively use backstage strategies (e.g., regulatory leniency) and frontstage strategies (e.g., legislative change) in complementary ways to advance destigmatization while safeguarding the state’s legitimacy. Finally, we show that starting a category destigmatization effort by emphasizing the category’s pragmatic values (prior to advocating for moral reevaluation of the category) can mitigate ideological conflict and increase chances of successful destigmatization.
... Bodies touching and being touched, bodies penetrating and being penetrated, bodies watching and being watched, bodies slapping and being slapped, bodies licking and being licked, bodies sucking and being sucked, bodies sweating together. A growing stream of literature has been interested in the bodies that perform these acts (Shadnam et al., 2021;Voss, 2015) as well as the bodies that consume pornography (Macleod, 2021;Traeen et al., 2004), but less attention is paid to the organization of bodies in pornography, not as an industry but in its enactment. In this article, we show the potential of studying pornography as an example of embodied organizing, as bodies are at the very core of pornography hitting "the blind corner of reason" and directly addressing our "primitive fantasies" (Despentes, 2010: 85). ...
Pornography organizes bodies in ways that reproduce, challenge, or possibly even change norms of gender and sexuality. In this paper, we explore the gendered organization of pornography, responding to a lack of research on this issue. The study engages in rhetorical and queer listening to investigate feminist pornography, analyzing audio stories produced by an all-female sex-tech company that creates pornography for women through a female gaze. Drawing on literature on gendered organizing, the study shows how the female gaze in feminist pornography organizes bodies in sexual scripts. Furthermore, an application of the concept of happy objects illuminates the complex embodied and entangled relations between sexual subjects and objects of desire. Finally, we demonstrate how, despite a shift from a male to a female gaze, feminist pornography is still prone to the reproduction of heteronormative gender stereotypes. The paper thereby outlines potentials as well as challenges for the (re)organization of bodies in feminist pornography.
... This study revealed the role emotions play in the course of new category emergence; more specifically, how negative emotions might be an impediment to new category emergence. Nonetheless, some market categories are inherently more controversial than others (Durand & Vergne, 2015;Hudson, 2008), such as the pornography industry (Trouble, 2016;Voss, 2019) or the arms industry (Vergne, 2012); yet they have survived widespread stigmatization by obtaining some form of legitimacy (Ashforth, 2019;Helms et al., 2019). Likewise, new category legitimation might not necessitate the eradication of negative emotions. ...
... The erotic gig economy is part of the broader gig economy but remains relatively self-contained, I argue, because sex work stigma causes employment discrimination (Armstrong 2019; Scarlet Alliance 2022: 3; Srikummoon, Thanutan et al. 2022; Stardust 2017; Victorian Equal Opportunity & Human RightsCommission 2023: 12). This is particularly the case for porn work which, due to its high visibility, often leads to employment discrimination against porn workers (Easterbrook-Smith 2022;Treloar, Stardust et al. 2021;Voss 2015). During my fieldwork, I met only two porn workers who worked in jobs outside of the sex industry: one was a teacher and one an uber driver and yoga instructor. ...
What does transgender pornography work involve? This ethnographic study of trans porn workers in Los Angeles and Las Vegas details their everyday work practices and the broader economic and technological changes that they have had to navigate. In doing so, it shows how trans porn workers have adopted a range of online influencer practices and technologies. Drawing on the profession of the influencer, this thesis argues that trans porn workers today are essentially online influencers, or ‘sex influencers.’
To contextualise contemporary trans porn work this thesis provides an extensive history of trans pornography. It then shows how the work of trans porn workers has dramatically changed in recent decades. Studio work no longer earns most porn workers a sufficient income. To make ends meet, workers today engage in a variety of different forms of sex work in what I term the ‘erotic gig economy.’ To thrive in this economy successful trans porn workers must embody a range of enterprising virtues as well as technical and administrative skills, which I characterise via the term ‘porntropreneurship.’ These virtues and skills reinforce privileges that run, among other factors, along the lines of class, race, and ability.
Much work in the erotic gig economy is mediated via online platforms. The emergence of online platforms has transformed the nature and geography of trans porn work. Importantly, it has also brought about new forms of online discrimination which unfairly target trans porn workers. This thesis provides three key examples of online platforms which illustrate the contemporary nature of trans porn work. It looks at webcamming, OnlyFans, and social media.
Finally, this thesis looks at branding. Branding is a self-promotion practice that involves various ongoing strategies of self-presentation with the goal of creating a public identity. Good branding speaks to consumer fantasies, and trans porn workers engage in various strategies of ‘authenticity’ to create an intimate relationship between themselves and their consumers. Despite what the term suggests, ‘authentic’ branding requires careful ongoing management and calculated intimate sharing. Importantly, it ties trans porn workers into a powerful industry beauty hierarchy which reproduces cisnormative, ableist, and racialized (i.e., white) beauty standards.
... Through Playboy and Hustler, Hefner and Flynt developed reputations as iconoclasts and disrupters. They were able to leverage their social status and growing visibility to establish themselves as legitimate and successful businessmen operating in an unsavory industry (Voss 2015). In the infrastructure of American shopping malls, Les Wexner achieved similar status with Victoria's Secret, at least until his downfall due to a longtime association with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. ...
The making of novel infrastructure often involves some kind of faith. This article considers a pair of experiments in the context of blockchain infrastructure led by entrepreneur Ameen Soleimani: MolochDAO and SpankChain, a grant fund and a sex-worker payments network, respectively. These enact a strategy we describe as “perverse attraction,” or the inversion of dominant moral hierarchies as a means of cultivating faithful practice around a still-incomplete infrastructural project. Although the technology at play is new, the strategy for advancing it reiterates the development of past infrastructures, from print cultures to the early internet. These precursors and the present case suggest that the strategy of perverse attraction, while occurring under the guise of empowerment, risks reinforcing the marginalization of its human participants.
... This study revealed the role emotions play in the course of new category emergence; more specifically, how negative emotions might be an impediment to new category emergence. Nonetheless, some market categories are inherently more controversial than others (Durand & Vergne, 2015;Hudson, 2008), such as the pornography industry (Trouble, 2016;Voss, 2019) or the arms industry (Vergne, 2012); yet they have survived widespread stigmatization by obtaining some form of legitimacy (Ashforth, 2019;Helms et al., 2019). Likewise, new category legitimation might not necessitate the eradication of negative emotions. ...
... less associated with their stigma. For example, assume stakeholders learn that two differently stigmatized firms -one a vendor of cadavers (Anteby, 2010) and the other a pornography studio (Voss, 2015) -each hire underaged workers. Would the same misconduct by each firm provoke the same reaction by stakeholders? ...
Organizational stigma is widely assumed to be a serious liability. However, a small body of research has begun to show that stigma can also lead to positive outcomes. A core assumption of this budding literature is that realizing a benefit from stigma requires firms to take active and strategic measures to turn stigma to their advantage. Shedding new light on this assumption, in the present research we show that stigma has a built‐in insurance‐like quality that buffers firms from the market consequences of their misconduct. Specifically, we demonstrate that when firms are caught greenwashing, organizational stigma protects them from consumer backlash, with no effort required on their part to realize this benefit. Across a longitudinal panel data study tracking 7,365 firms in 47 countries over a 15‐year period, plus an experiment, we show that stigmatized firms are subjected to less market discipline for greenwashing. We further demonstrate that the mechanism driving this phenomenon is a certain ‘boys will be boys’ expectation by consumers that stigmatized firms lack integrity and, by consequence, are given greater leeway to greenwash. In so doing, we move beyond prior research focusing on the strategies firms can deploy to leverage stigma to their advantage, highlighting instead the psychological mechanisms that make organizational stigma more than a liability to be overcome in the marketplace, but also an asset.
... Moreover, there are important questions to ask about Spain's attractiveness to the Swedish Private Media Group, and to British porno-emigres who sought refuge from the UK's tighter laws on production and distribution (Voss 2015). These do have links to the ways in which both Barcelona and Madrid were centres of struggle over sexuality, sexual freedoms and expression. ...
Available in Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies at https://www.synoptique.ca/_files/ugd/811df8_d8ebaedae87e4f1fbdab97459ebfeca9.pdf
In this essay, I analyse aspects of the documentary series Porn Laid Bare (BBC 2017) as a mainstream educational tool, in order to explore some of the limitations of current discussions of “porn literacy.” Porn literacy has been offered as a key means of lessening pornography’s supposed harms to young people but, as I will go on to argue, there is little that is very literate in the proposed interventions. Not least because conceptions of porn
literacy generally have little relation to the considerable and developing bodies of research and understanding emerging from a dedicated porn studies approach. Perhaps that is something porn scholars ought to be worried about.
... Yet little work by comparison explores the internal structures and the organization of labour. Voss (2012Voss ( , 2015 attributes this to stigma 24 . Stigma surrounding pornography can impede empirical study, as industry participants are not necessarily quick to trust curious outsiders. ...
This dissertation examines occupational health protocols used to prevent the transmission of STIs and HIV in porn production, both those imposed by governmental health agencies and those developed by porn performers themselves. There is much disagreement over what protocols are best for the industry. Using critical interpretive medical anthropology from a sex worker rights perspective, this research asks what is at stake in these disputes over appropriate porn health practice. Qualitative data was collected through 40 interviews with 36 porn workers, in-person and digital fieldwork across several sites, textual analysis of relevant media and documents, and auto-ethnography as a porn performer. I trace how government and lobby groups have routinely discounted porn performers’ testimony about what would make their working conditions safe and comfortable, and the many ways that the porn industry has responded. In doing so, I make three primary arguments: First, porn workers have been ignored in conversations around the management of their occupational health. This is an example of epistemic injustice—the state of being wronged in one’s capacity to know and be known. Second, this marginalization puts pressure on the porn industry to focus on securing legitimacy among mainstream healthcare critics—what I call the Responsibility Defense. When pushed to focus on respectability, the occupational health solutions produced by the porn industry reinforce rather than challenge status quo sexual health practice, which can lead to exclusionary, discriminatory, and ableist occupational health protocols, like the exclusion of HIV+ performers. On the other hand, when porn performers manage health and safety on their own terms, they offer compelling alternatives that trouble and expand key concepts—like autonomy, community, and consent—that form the heart of public and occupational health praxis. Third, this demonstrates how important it is for public health and health policy makers to centre epistemically marginalized subjects—not just to ensure that policies meet the needs of those they are meant to support, but also to ensure that we benefit from the rich and unique contributions of all social members.
... Moreover, there are important questions to ask about Spain's attractiveness to the Swedish Private Media Group, and to British porno-emigres who sought refuge from the UK's tighter laws on production and distribution (Voss 2015). These do have links to the ways in which both Barcelona and Madrid were centres of struggle over sexuality, sexual freedoms and expression. ...
As a proliferating subfield of sexuality studies, porn studies has become a larger framework to understand sexually explicit media. The growth of the discipline has been supported through debates and disagreements that allow for teasing out radical ethics and politics which, in turn, enable certain reading practices and representational schemas to persist. The growth and solidification of porn studies notwithstanding, the field maintains a marginal status in academia. Porn scholars routinely attend conferences where fellow attendees are embarrassed by their topics, and stories abound of young scholars who are advised to repackage their work in order to be taken more seriously or seem more “hireable.” In other words, assumptions exist that pornography studies are either too limited in scope or too contentious for the academy. The three co-editors of this issue all study porn from radically different perspectives: Darshana researches transnational porn cultures with a specific focus on South Asia, Nikola employs a queer historicist approach to adult media within a larger discourse on urban masculinities, and Rebecca studies the cultures and technologies of digital pornography. Through our discussions, which were originally occasioned by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group where the three of us met, it became evident to us that adult media allows for a confluence of different
ideas, sensibilities, and political perspectives even as it represents a point of departure from more traditional objects of study. With that in mind, we wanted this special issue on “Porn and its Uses” to wrestle with critiques, both institutional and popular, that had questioned and challenged pornography on the grounds of its use value or as “pointless” deliberation while at the same time meditating on our own sense of porn’s usefulness as an object of study.
... Consider, for instance, the case of medical treatments produced from blood plasma of donors who receive financial compensation. This industry has traditionally been accused of being a "market for the human body" and has shared this vilifying label with related industries such as the bone marrow industry, and with businesses as diverse as reproductive material (Almeling, 2007), surrogacy (Elias, Lacetera, Macis, & Salardi, 2017), and prostitution (Voss, 2015). However, at least in the United States, the rising salience of a morally approved attributethat is, the potential of those treatments to "save human lives," which is inconsistent with a vilifying label (Elias, Lacetera, & Macis, 2015)-challenged existing attributions. ...
... Thus, the perspective we take is that the (potential) emancipation enabled by entrepreneurship does not eliminate oppressive structures to generate absolute freedom; rather, it eases some constraints to provide a limited form of freedom. stigmatized based on race, sexual preference, or physical characteristics (Goffman, 1963); importantly, stigma also operates at the occupation, organization, and industry levels (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999;Durand & Vergne,2015;Piazza& Perretti,2015;Simpson,Slutskaya,Lewis, & Hopfl, 2012;Voss, 2015;Zhang,Wang, Toubiana & Greenwood, 2021). Whereas individual stigmas are typically uncontrollable (e.g., gender, race), stigmas associated with occupations, organizations, and industries are often viewed as controllable; as such, individuals are further sanctioned and stigmatizedforchoosingtodefyortransgresssocialnorms (Bruyaka, Philippe, & Castañer, 2018;Crocker et al., 1998). ...
... Some have focused on performers, showing that while most are not forced into the industry and some exercise varying degrees of control over their careers ), many come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, where economic opportunities are scarce. Once in the industry, many performers have limited control over the sexual scenes and many of them suffer from long-term negative impacts, including traumatic experiences and a stigma that is particularly hard to shake off, limiting their future opportunities (Bauer & Gradus, 2015;Ketcham, 2014;Voss, 2015;Wagoner, 2012). As we have shown in Chapter 4, arguments about pornography's complete lack of negative effects on viewers have also been widely refuted by a wide range of empirical research (particularly research on pornography that includes aggression). ...
... The history of pornography is fragmentary at best, owing largely to its illicit and stigmatized nature (Voss 2015), but the release of Deep Throat in 1972 is generally credited with propelling pornography "into the center of the cultural stage" (Schaefer 2002: 4), ushering in the era of "porno chic," as well as feminist backlash (Lederer 1980;Bronstein 2011). Feminists were far from united on the issue of pornography, a divide that would only deepen throughout the 1980s as feminists clashed at the infamous Barnard Conference on Women's Sexuality in 1982 (Vance 1984;Queen and Comella 2008;Bronstein 2015) and as pornography's allegedly deleterious effects became a focus of the Reagan-era culture wars (Vance 1997;Strub 2010). ...
This article introduces the field of trans pornography studies and makes a case for why studying it matters. We locate trans pornography within the broader field of porn studies, while also pointing to its importance to transgender studies. We map the history of trans pornography and examine the wider social, political, and economic forces contributing to the transformation of trans porn into a genre of mainstream straight porn. We discuss the economic organization of the trans porn industry and current industry trends, including geographical shifts in production and the rise of alternative production platforms. We address areas of future research and the need for more scholarship on the political economy of the trans porn industry, audiences and consumers, transmasculine representation in pornography, and research that focuses on trans porn production outside the United States.
... Some authors contend however, that the term 'pornography addiction' is inaccurate, stigmatizing, and pathologizing, given moral and historical values that regard sexual activity as a taboo topic (Voss 2015). In this review, we use the term selfperceived problematic pornography use (SPPPU), defined as self-identified pornography addiction and feelings of inability to regulate pornography use (Sniewski et al. 2018). ...
Although pornography can be a healthy expression of sexuality, some individuals report difficulty and distress regulating their pornography use. Self-perceived problematic pornography use (SPPPU) refers to one’s negative self-evaluation of their pornography use, which is inherently subjective. SPPPU has been associated with decreased psychological well-being and overall functioning. Given the subjective nature of ‘pornography addiction’ (i.e., SPPPU), the integration of different levels of analysis of this phenomenon are complicated. To address this issue, we propose an integrative model of SPPPU, using both the Research Domain Criteria and ecological lenses. We propose that SPPPU can produce change in the molecular, circuits, and behavioral levels, as well as in the interpersonal, community, and societal levels. As a social phenomenon, SPPPU is associated to societal structures, community norms, and interpersonal distress. This social phenomenon is also connected to biological changes, including excessive activation of reward systems, increase in dopamine, and sexual dysfunctions. The negative effects in the individual level amplify and maintain societal implications. Future studies should focus on prevention and treatment that can integrate different units of analysis and look at this phenomenon holistically.
... This rivalry resulted in gin shifting from being associated with the newly established national identity to being considered the spirit of the outcasts, which produced the conditions for its stigmatization (Vergne, 2012). Even though the stigmatization of product categories is often the result of their contentious morality (Anteby, 2010;Voss, 2015), it can also occur because the category is associated with someone or something that carries a devalued social identity (Crocker, Major, & Steele, 1998). Throughout the 18th century, the stigma of gin resulted from the association between gin and its typical consumers, the lower class. ...
This article provides a historically grounded explanation of category emergence and change by using the gin category as an example. Formerly a standardized spirit produced by a narrow group of large England-based producers, gin has become a premium craft spirit made by thousands of big and small producers in every corner of the world – a categorical shift that commentators have dubbed the ‘ginaissance’. We approach product categories as socially constructed entities and make informed use of history to explain the successive categorical dynamics. Strategic action field theory is applied to explain how internal and external category actors interact to create and change product meanings and affect categorical configurations. Our results show how the intricate, complex and historically embedded processes that the product category underwent first triggered stigmatization and then put conditions in place that led to concentration and made the current ginaissance possible. Findings drawn from this study of gin contribute to research on product categories by revealing some peculiar dynamics of concentration and partitioning, status recategorization and categorical stigma, which are summarized in an empirically grounded process model of category emergence and change.
... less associated with their stigma. For example, assume stakeholders learn that two differently stigmatized firms -one a vendor of cadavers (Anteby, 2010) and the other a pornography studio (Voss, 2015) -each hire underaged workers. Would the same misconduct by each firm provoke the same reaction by stakeholders? ...
... Stigmatized organizations are evaluated as possessing morally objectionable traits that make them inferior (Devers et al., 2009). These traits can be organizational practices, such as the extreme violence of mixed martial arts (Helms & Patterson, 2014) or selling human cadavers (Anteby, 2010); the product or service offered, such as weapons (Vergne, 2012) or pornography (Voss, 2015); or the customers served, such as gay men (Hudson & Okhuysen, 2009) or members of lower social classes (Hampel & Tracey, 2017). Devers and colleagues (2009: 157) succinctly captured the importance of morals and emotions in ascribing stigma when arguing that "stigmas elicit strong negative affective reactions, such as disgust, fear, and repulsion, from the nonstigmatized that heighten awareness and intensify negative behavioral reactions." ...
In this review of the literature on reputation, status, celebrity and stigma we develop an overarching theoretical framework based on the rational, emotional and moral aspects of each construct’s unique sociocognitive content, and the mechanisms through which it affects audience evaluations. We use this framework to assess the construct definitions and empirical measures employed in current research, and offer our assessments of how well they reflect each construct’s sociocognitive content, distinguish the constructs from other constructs, and distinguish the constructs from their antecedents and consequences. We then articulate the implications of our framework and analyses for future research.
... wears sunglasses or a mask)'. This omission may be due to the considerable stigma and public judgement that are often associated with performing in pornographic material (Voss 2015). Thus, it is understandable that some men would shield their identity when appearing in gay SEM regardless of their sexuality or the sexual content of the scene. ...
Gay pornography has traditionally utilized male performers who are coded as ‘heterosexual’ (e.g. stating they are straight) to perform gay sexual acts. However, research has yet to examine gay men’s perceptions of ‘straight’ men in sexually explicit material (SEM). The current article evaluates the perceived believability and erotic value of variables used to code a male performer as ‘heterosexual’ in gay SEM. In a first study, which was exploratory in nature, a sample of gay men (N = 56) evaluated 53 variables on the dimensions of believability and erotic value. The 20 most salient indicators of heterosexuality were then examined by a larger sample of gay men (N = 214). Results suggest that performers’ reluctance to engage in certain sexual acts is a believable indicator of heterosexuality. Variables that are often linked with masculinity and sexual satisfaction were accorded the most erotic value. Gay participants’ endorsement of traditional masculinity correlated positively with the belief that reluctance denoted heterosexuality and that ‘masculine’ attributes were erotic. Contrary to our predictions, few statistically significant associations were observed for internalized homonegativity. Limitations of the current research and avenues for future inquiry are elucidated.
In 2012, voters in Los Angeles County passed Measure B, a controversial law requiring porn performers to wear condoms on set. Many people predicted the porn industry would flee California, relocating to cities with more lax regulations, while the media fuelled speculation about the long-term impact of Measure B on California’s economy. Although claims that the industry would abandon California were exaggerated, several porn production companies did establish in Las Vegas, a city known worldwide as a sexual entertainment destination. In this chapter I examine the campaign against Measure B, arguing that it casts a spotlight on the shifting “spatial contours” of the U.S. porn industry and reveals how competing “geographies of pornography” are produced both discursively and through regulatory measures.
Organization and management research has largely ignored the pornography industry. In many ways this is understandable; production often takes place under disturbing conditions, and the dissemination and consumption of porn is considered taboo. Nonetheless, we cannot neglect the fact that it is a multi-billion-dollar industry with significant economic, social and cultural impact. We believe scholars have an obligation to study and understand not only the talk-of-the-town organizations, but the shush-and-move-on ones too, drawing out their ethical and cultural significance. The collection of papers in this special section aptly demonstrates that pornography can be studied as an organizational phenomenon. The section includes an editorial as well as three individual papers.
Adult content creators’ copyright is undermined in the profitable,
gig economy, porn industry. From an analysis of the terms of use
on the ManyVids, Chaturbate, OnlyFans and Pornhub porn
platforms, the results show such creators have no bargaining
power vis-à-vis online platforms. Although they create
pornographic content, the copyrightability of their works is
obscured because the recognition of their authorship is often a
smokescreen. This is because, under the terms of use, they are
forced to perpetually transfer their economic rights to online
platforms without royalties in exchange as well as waiving their
moral rights. By using Radin’s pragmatist feminist methodology,
we suspend any critique of the goodness or badness of
pornography in order to unveil the double bind that adult
content creators working in the gig economy face in the context
of UK copyright law.
Within romantic relationships, secret-keeping has been related to negative outcomes whereas self-disclosure has been related to positive outcomes. Exploring young adult women's pornography use disclosures to their romantic partners can provide further avenues for understanding aspects of sexual and relational health. Using an open-ended survey informed by the Revelation Risk Model (RRM), this study explored young adult women's reasons and perceived relational outcomes of disclosing their pornography use to their romantic partners. Data from 32 young adult women (M = 20.8 years old), were thematically analyzed. Women in our sample reported disclosing for three main reasons: disclosed to be close, disclosed because we are intimate, and speaking our minds. They also reported that their disclosures resulted in emotional, sexual, or no relational changes. Further, we found that women who engaged in more in-depth conversations following their pornography disclosures perceived there to be more positive relational changes in comparison to women who had surface-level conversations following their pornography disclosures.
The term dirty work refers to occupations or work that are deemed as degrading, demoralizing, demeaning, or disgusting. For occupational members engaged dirty work, the stigma of “dirty work” hinders the ability of dirty workers to construct a positive identity. Our study examines the dynamics of workplace dignity in the dirty work context of sex work in Taiwan. Sex workers endure multiple stigmas and discrimination than those in other dirty work occupations. Stigmatization has been linked to negative consequences, including poorer work satisfaction, higher stress and burnout, and poor mental and physical health. Based on interviews with relevant stakeholders from the special service clubs in Taiwan coupled with on-site observations, this study explores how dignity is constructed by dirty workers. According to our findings, the reframing approach is adopted by dirty workers with the assistance of relevant stakeholders of the business. This phenomenon is coined as “collective reframing” in which key stakeholders help occupational members adjust to unpleasant demands by reframing such tasks as professional work. In so doing, such tasks are imbued with positive value. Our findings suggest that there is a quintessential need for tailored assistance to address the interconnected dimensions of stigma encountered by dirty workers.KeywordsStigmaWorkplace dignityDirty workIdentity
In this scholarly conversation, Dr Rebecca Sullivan and Dr Valerie Webber share their experiences in sex work and how it has informed their research in their different areas of sexuality studies. Dr Webber, who has worked as both a porn and cam performer, is a postdoctoral scholar at Dalhousie University’s Sexual Health and Gender (SHaG) Research Lab. Dr Sullivan, a professor in the Department of English at University of Calgary, had a brief stint as a phone sex operator during her undergraduate studies. Together, they reflect on the similarities between sex labour and academic labour, from precarity to gig economies. Their research has deepened their understanding of stigma and emphasized the importance of allied scholarship in order to imagine new research frameworks for porn studies that foreground sexual health and rights for vulnerable communities.
Adult content creators’ copyright is undermined in the profitable, gig economy, porn industry. From an analysis of the terms of use on the ManyVids, Chaturbate, OnlyFans and Pornhub porn platforms, the results show such creators have no bargaining power vis-à-vis online platforms. Although they create pornographic content, the copyrightability of their works is obscured because the recognition of their authorship is often a smokescreen. This is because, under the terms of use, they are forced to perpetually transfer their economic rights to online platforms without royalties in exchange as well as waiving their moral rights. By using Radin’s pragmatist feminist methodology, we suspend any critique of the goodness or badness of pornography in order to unveil the double bind that adult content creators working in the gig economy face in the context of UK copyright law.
S’appuyant sur une enquête ethnographique par observation et entretien, cet article explore le rôle des sources de revenus complémentaires dans l’économie politique de l’industrie pornographique nord-américaine. Pour de nombreuses actrices de porno, tourner une scène dans un film relève davantage d’une tactique de marketing – visant à valoriser d’autres services plus rémunérateurs – que d’une activité professionnelle principale. Cette tactique permet aux actrices d’exercer un contrôle sur leur vie professionnelle, en tournant à leur avantage un contexte économique qui pourrait sinon les conduire à l’épuisement. Ces sources de revenus complémentaires contribuent cependant à maintenir des salaires peu élevés et à entretenir une armée de réserve de travailleuses enclines à tourner des scènes, y compris pour une faible rémunération et dans de mauvaises conditions. Ces revenus complémentaires placent enfin les travailleuses dans une position ambivalente, où elles se retrouvent à la fois indépendantes, entrepreneuses, managers et productrices. À l’appui d’une analyse féministe marxiste, l’article interroge ainsi la reconfiguration des rapports de classe dans l’industrie pornographique.
This article argues for the need for the empirical analysis of how firms manage repugnance and core-stigmatization. To develop our empirical perspective, we compare the work on repugnance with the existing empirical literature in management on core-stigma and argue that core-stigmatization results from the mobilized repugnance. The core-stigmatized firm faces higher transaction costs. We demonstrate, through a case-study of the strategies of MindGeek/Pornhub in the online pornography market, how transaction costs economics can explain the choice of strategies to deal with core-stigma. Under most conditions, the increased transaction costs lead to vertical and lateral integration of the firm. In a dynamic setting, rival firms might use stigmatization to prevent the entry of a new competitor. Our second case-study on the early decades of the mail-order company Sears, Roebuck, and Company illustrates that repugnance, including racial discrimination, was mobilized by competitors to block the entry of the firm into the market.
Sex robots are playing critical roles in the ecology of robot and AI-enhanced entities. This chapter’s focuses are on emerging controversies involving sex robots and other forms of AI-enabled sexual activity, which often help to elucidate the emerging power and control relationships between humans and robots. Questions of whether robots “outclass” humans (discussed throughout the book) are construed in different manners when the robots involved are one’s own specially-designed sexual partners or even spouses. Many kinds of contact individuals have with robots are indeed disempowering (such as with surveillance-related robots); however, the commodification of various aspects of sex robot interaction discussed in this chapter can serve to increase perceptions of mastery and control that would otherwise not be available to many people, often with unsettling results.KeywordsRoboticsSex robotsArtificial intelligenceSexualityMarriagePowerControlAddictionMasterySurveillancePrivacy
Stigmatized organizations are generally assumed to face a variety of unique operational challenges. This paper examines the survival of stigmatized organizations in light of such challenges. Specifically, we investigate how patterns of opposition and support from multiple external stakeholders and audiences affect organizational survival within the context of abortion provision in the United States. We use a fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the causal linkages between the above factors and the survival outcomes of the full identifiable industry of 983 abortion clinics that were in operation in the U.S. between 2011 and 2017. Our results reveal the existence of multiple paths to survival, based primarily on either the absence of overt opposition or the presence of factors like political support that enabled organizations to overcome other threats to survival. Our findings show how socio‐political factors affect the survival of organizations in stigmatized industries.
Modern pornography performers face a variety of different and rapidly changing working conditions and have a range of obstacles to navigate in order to stand out from their peers and attain stardom. As well as learning on-set skills that focus on sexual activity, performers need to quickly develop a range of skills offset, from branding to social media management. However, one aspect that also needs analysis is the relationship between performers and their fans. In my doctoral research into the experiences of women working in pornography, performers outlined some of the positive and negative aspects of maintaining an accessible relationship with fans. These relationships included both online and real-life interactions at expos such as the AVN expo in Las Vegas. While some performers noted that fans flew across the world to meet them, others revealed disturbing interactions tinged with violence. These interactions ranged from physical violence to stalking and family harassment. This behaviour of ‘trophy hunting’ from fans will be discussed in the context of exploring labour conditions and the management of the identity of ‘porn star’ that performers navigate.
This chapter argues that the enduring relevance of the trans criminal has hardly dissipated despite the decrease in psychotic killers familiar to twentieth-century audiences. Crime genres, which include police procedurals, horror thrillers, and investigative mysteries, contain elements that justify either criminal acts or victimization, so this chapter begins by explicating how the genre’s common elements, like criminal locales and the investigator’s neoliberal sophistication, associate trans characters with criminality even as their characterization shifted from perpetrator to witness or victim. This chapter then argues that the conflation of sexual perversity and criminality found in earlier trans horror and crime villains can explain why sex workers remain popular across the generic spectrum. Feminist theory is used to lay out the complex threat female sex workers usually represent and how their trans identity further justifies their disposability, particularly when the majority are racial minorities. Both types of trans criminals, then, threaten cis- and heteronormativity, whether literally through violence or figuratively through transactional, gender-ambiguous sex.
This chapter contests the liberatory presumption of greater media visibility. Despite publicized assertions to the contrary, false assumptions about cisnormativity and the sex/gender binary remain as indicated by representative examples of trans characters from different television genres aired in 2015. The significance of this study’s close attention to genre and methodology beyond typical protagonists and texts is then supported using other queer studies scholarship which specify the usefulness of “cross-textual seriality” which creates a “developmental narrative” of minority identity (Wlodarz). This chapter also introduces the relevance of “transnormativity” to expose the hierarchical differentials based on gender, race, and class that create a white feminine standard representation and conflate relevant differences between trans identities. The chapter concludes with an explanation regarding why neither LGBQ nor feminist media scholarship alone can elucidate the complexity of transphobic representations. It ends with a brief overview of the chapters.
Religion and sexuality are polysemic categories. While conservative religion often fights against progressive sexual politics in contemporary America, this “usual story” is fractured and destabilized by people navigating the relationship between religion and sexuality as complex social creatures, not pundits or caricatures. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship, I examine salient issues of sexual politics—including abortion and reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and pornography—to show how religious actors have been on both sides of these debates. Because of this polysemic complexity, scholars of religion must not only tend to the dynamic interaction between religion and other categories, we must also recognize and study the diversity within the categories themselves.
Organizational involvement in stigmatized practices, that is, practices that attract substantial societal condemnation, is often challenging, inasmuch as it requires the successful management of stakeholder disapproval. In this regard, existing work on organizational stigma has highlighted the advantages of situating stigmatized practices within large, generalist organizations, because doing so allows for stigma dilution—that is, organizations can reduce stakeholder disapproval by increasing their relative engagement in uncontested practices, thereby straddling multiple categories in the eyes of audiences. This line of argument, however, runs counter to the empirical observation that stigmatized practices often remain overwhelmingly concentrated within smaller, specialist organizations, even though these are often not optimally positioned to cope with stigma. In this paper, therefore, we undertake an in-depth historical analysis of a revelatory case—abortion provision in the United States following the landmark Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision—to build theory of how stigmatized categories can come to be populated predominantly by specialists. Building on primary and secondary archival materials, we identify three mechanisms that shaped category evolution and resulted in the de facto segregation of abortion into specialist organizations: the founding of freestanding facilities by values-driven providers, the exit of generalist organizations from the category, and the involuntary specialization of remaining providers, as customers no longer frequented them for other services and they soon became labeled simply as “abortion clinics.” We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the stigma literature and the generalizability of our theorizing to other settings.
Authenticity in new wave heteroporn is characterized by a commitment to ethical and transparent production, diversity, and mutual pleasure. Lightsouthern is a contemporary new wave Australian porn producer claiming to capture ‘authentically sexy Aussie experience’. This article examines Lightsouthern’s statements, behind-the-scenes videos, interviews, and contracts to reveal how authentic pleasure is constructed and contrasted to 1990s Australian heteroporn. The article positions Lightsouthern’s representation of ‘real’, inclusive pleasures as an evolution of the co-development of settler sexuality and pornography. Lightsouthern’s commitment to transparency and diversity are specific neocolonial strategies that represent settler pleasure as harmonious, unproblematic, and inclusive. Two examples of potentially decolonial pornography, NDNGirls.com and Fuck the Fascism, are analyzed to expose the problems of ‘real’ pleasure in settler heteroporn. The article argues that depoliticizing pleasure to markers of authenticity, inclusivity, and diversity in settler heteroporn masks the ongoing role of settler sexuality and pornography in denying Indigenous desires, representation, and futures.
This article investigates the communication and branding strategies developed by Pornhub in order to describe the way in which the site reshapes the social meaning of pornographic consumption and builds a reputational profile directed to consumers, to mainstream media, to investors and to institutions. Since 2013, Pornhub – a tube site that is part of a bigger conglomerate (MindGeek) owning similar tubes and other pornography producers – has built its brand focusing on technological innovation, education, partnerships with artists and pop singers, sponsoring and social investment. Pornhub certainly cannot hide the pornographic nature of the material it distributes, but instead seeks to accredit itself with stakeholders giving to the tube the profile of corporate social responsibility as formulated by a standard like ISO 26000: 2010. In order to achieve public respectability through social responsibility, Pornhub is described according to a narrative that separates the infrastructure of the distribution (the tube itself) from the producers, the directors, the performers and the workers who create the pornographic video, who are still exposed to stigma.
In this chapter, the author describes the processes of how workers in pornography are recruited and/or endeavor to work in the porn industry. As the author has seen, like in traditional organizations, employers in pornography are looking for workers who are motivated, have a great attitude and good work ethic. For example, before they cast someone, producers of pornography want to tell a little bit about a prospect’s psychological state, too. How eager they are to do it? How motivated by money they are to do it, as opposed to the fun aspect? Specific worker profiles will be explored, as well as, worker turnover and retention.
In this chapter, career management and development aspects will be explored. Length of tenure, job enlargement, and job enrichment are discussed. Also, how many workers in pornography endeavor to leave performing and go back to “normal” life. Some performers become producers and directors in the adult film business, as well as, start their own pornography companies. Others try to go onto mainstream movies and entertainment like Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords. Explored also is how mainstream celebrities became more popular or discovered because of the release of a sex tape. Examples of this are with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Montana Fishburne and in the case of Kim Kardashian, a sex tape led to an empire.
Group status and status legitimacy were tested as moderators of devaluing in response to threatening intergroup comparisons. In 3 experiments, participants received feedback comparing their in-group (based on school or gender) to a higher or lower status out-group. When the legitimacy of group status differences was assumed (Studies 1 and 2) or manipulated (Study 3), participants devalued the domain when their in-group compared unfavorably with a lower status out-group but did not devalue the domain when their in-group compared unfavorably with a higher status out-group. In Study 3, this status value asymmetry was eliminated when status differences were delegitimized. Mediational analyses suggested that the status value asymmetry was explained by the perceived utility of the domain for gaining status-relevant rewards.
Exotic dancing and other types of sex work (e.g. prostitution, pornography) hold a low position in the hierarchy of paid work (Price, 2008) and other social hierarchies. These occupations are viewed as dirty work (Hughes, 1958) - physically, morally and socially tainted. Individuals who work in these occupations must manage the stigma associated with the work and in turn the stigma associated with being ‘dirty workers’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999). It has been argued that the construction and maintenance of positive, affirming identities in this context are complex and problematic (Grandy, 2008). Price (2008) notes that constituents of exotic dancing establishments (e.g. club owners, managers, disc jockeys, clients, bar workers, dancers) re-produce gendered stereotypes of dancers - wild, easy, untrustworthy, immature, unreliable, expendable and promiscuous.
It used to be complaints about scantily clad ladies in provocative poses, but now opponents of girlie magazines are applauding the accumulation of dust on British newsagents' top shelves as sales of soft-core plummet. In defiance of the claims of antiporn campaigners that pornography can only proliferate if allowed high street outlets, this branch of sexually explicit production seems to have had its day. All the major UK publishers have felt the effects of waning sales and diminishing profits as "top-shelf lovelies" have been replaced by more profitable sandwiches in high street newsagents. The decline of the girlie magazine could simply be ascribed to competition from new media formats, but the picture is more complex than a linear movement of consumer preference from page to screen. Research and debate about "pornography" have tended to favor exploration of content and effects, ignoring investigation of the market and the political and institutional frameworks that determine the professional production of top-shelf magazines: the economics of the trade are generally judged to be exploitative and therefore to be condemned, not investigated. Thus, very little reliable empirical and statistical evidence exists. In the twilight zone, regulated and curtailed by a legal system that grudgingly acknowledges profitability but not probity, soft-core pornography has rarely been considered as a business. The details of who owns what; the production contexts of girlie magazine publishing; and the costs of staffing a magazine, commissioning articles and photography, and preparing layout, print, and distribution are discussed only in the context of scandalized exposés of the possible harms of smut for profit. Traditionally, discussions of pornography have failed to engage directly with either the producers of pornography, except as the vilified and shadowy figure of the "pornographer," or readers of such material except where those readers "confess" to the ways in which pornography has contributed to their corruption. 1 Where women's voices have featured in accounts of the pornography industry, it has generally been as victims either of its production processes or of its use in social or personal situations.2 These accounts, with their attendant focus on the "harms" of pornography, have also tended to sediment the gender divisions of "male perpetrator" and "female victim" so that pornography has achieved dubious status as the subordinating representational regime underpinning patriarchy. The central characters in the pornography drama have not, of course, gone unchallenged, but, where authors have raised important questions about porn's monolithic status within academic, legal, and social discussion, their interventions are not problem free. They tend to valorize certain "transgressive" practices of producing and using pornography, thereby contributing to a further hierarchizing of desire with "radical" or politicized porn at the top and the more mundane and widespread use of mass-market porn at the bottom. The recuperation of some producers as "sex radicals" does not illuminate the more mundane activities of the "pornocrats"-those publishers whose intentions are not taboo busting for political ends but, rather, for economic rewards. Beyond being an object of concern, pornography is a continuously expanding phenomenon, constantly able to "reinvent" itself (although the extent to which its favorite representational tropes are reinvented is the subject of some dispute), utilizing new technologies such as CD-ROM, video, and the Internet in order to reach ever more consumers. The exploitation of new technology is matched by an ability to cater to increasingly specialized markets: for example, the rise of materials addressed to gay and lesbian consumers and the growth of sadomasochism (S-M) materials. These expansions have seen pornography move from a very narrow availability to what at times seems like very mainstream acceptability.3 Although its expansion is a fascinating area for exploration and investigation, I focus here on stories of stagnation and contraction: one high-profile publisher has recently proclaimed the death of the UK's traditional soft-core business. This essay focuses on one sexually explicit media form: British soft-core publications available at high street newsagents.5 The UK pornographic publishing market can be divided into two spheres: material that does not violate current laws in force (i.e., legal material) and everything else. My concern here is the legally available material easily accessible through the network of newsagents throughout the United Kingdom. In the past two years the soft-core scene in Britain has changed substantially with the decision by the British Board of Film Certification (BBFC) to pass seven explicit videos for R18 certification on appeal.6 This has meant that sex shops are finally able to sell explicit and close-up shots of actual penetration; in line with this relaxation of the BBFC guidelines has been a major increase in the number of hard-core magazine titles on sex shop shelves. These magazines are excluded from my discussion here as they are primarily confined to licensed premises rather than the high street newsagents.7 Material available on the top shelf in Britain is still the softest soft-core in Europe, and my focus here is limited to the traditional adult magazines featuring glamour pictures of women (usually alone but sometimes with a female partner) in various states of undress. In delineating my area of study, I take an industry classification rather than a definition derived from moral or aesthetic discourses. By focusing on one narrow (and peculiarly British) section of the adult trade, I am attempting an analysis that recognizes the specificities of individual pornographic forms and their commercial determinants.8 This position can be defended by noting Linda Williams's comments on the scarcity of writing about "actual texts" that has led to the polarization of the debates such that pornography is either totally divisible from or entirely conterminous with other forms of cultural production.9 Williams observes that "pornography may not be special, but it does have a specificity distinct from other genres."10 That specificity lies in its representational intention to arouse its viewers/ readers sexually, and it is this quality that sets porn as a genre apart even as it might share some of the representational tropes of more "mainstream" or "respectable" forms. Studies of sexually explicit material often flatten out the mediumspecific qualities of, for example, video or photography in order to make the generalizable case about pornography. This categorization has produced an essentialist tendency that finds continuities and uniformity of content in material ranging, for example, from photographic images of children to depictions of sexual activities between consenting adults in videos marketed to gay men. The concentration or distillation of the "essence of pornography" distorts the ways in which we could understand the production and uses of individual forms of sexually explicit materials,11 leading to claims such as Simon Hardy's that "the appearance of colourful diversity belies uniformity of content and quality and the fact that, like brands of washing powder, 'top-shelf ' magazines are almost all owned by the same two or three parties."12 Like washing powder and many other mass-produced commodities, pornography suffers from a surfeit of contempt that manifests itself in characterizations of the category's homogeneity and, following from that, the uniformity of possible responses to, or expectations of, its subsets. However much the products may appear alike on the shelves, this cannot be an indication of the ways they are used once removed from there. Although issues relating to content and consumption are not for discussion here, the accusations of banality are precisely symptoms of the tendency, found in theory as well as "commonsense" discourse, to produce pornography as genre and form without boundaries, thereby avoiding the material elements of its production and reception in favor of its social role as the repository for all things abhorrent. Accusations of misogyny and the corrosive influence of big business are often deemed sufficient analysis of material production.
Studies of organization stigma have become increasing prominent. Yet these studies are not uncontroversial; structural barriers to the study of organization stigma still exist within the profession. We argue for the study of stigma, highlighting its importance. We then explain how structural barriers threaten the study of organization stigma by imposing inappropriate boundaries on scholarly inquiry, and by threatening the validity of the findings derived from such studies. We also outline the sources and consequences of the structural barriers that impose these obstacles. We end by suggesting ways that such studies can be reframed in an effort to overcome or lessen the taboo nature of the stigma studies. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav.
This article broadens our perspective of stigma by examining the process of disclosing an invisible stigmatized identity in work and nonwork domains. I present a model that examines the effects of individual and environmental factors on disclosure decisions across life domains. Individuals may disclose their stigma to varying degrees across life domains, and this inconsistency leads to disclosure disconnects. I examine psychological states and outcomes associated with disclosure disconnects and offer directions for future research.
We use meta-analytical techniques to address three central debates in institutional theory: Is organizational behavior the product of social structure or organizational agency? Does conformity to institutional norms enhance or diminish organizational performance? Can organizational field-level factors explain differences in the pull of isomorphic forces across organizational fields? We find that the influence of social structure is weak. Also, the adoption of isomorphic templates improves both symbolic and substantive performance. Finally, we identify several field-level factors that moderate isomorphic processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for institutional theory research.
Drawing on propositions from social identity theory and signaling theory, we hypothesized that firms' corporate social performance (CSP) is related positively to their reputations and to their attractiveness as employers. Results indicate that independent ratings of CSP are related to firms' reputations and attractiveness as employers, suggesting that a firm's CSP may provide a competitive advantage in attracting applicants. Such results add to the growing literature suggesting that CSP map provide firms with competitive advantages.
In the past the USA has relied upon spinoff from its massive defense research and development spending to enrich commercial technology. In an era when US industry enjoyed a commanding lead over its international competitors, such spinoff was thought to be enough. But in today's globally competitive economy, a more direct approach is better suited to the needs of commercial markets. This book examines how the government and the private sector can boost America's technological competitiveness and how the two influence each others' technical activities.
In this collection of essays, an international group of scholars investigate the global building cleaning industry to reveal the extent of neoliberalism's impact on cleaners. • This book provides the first intensive study focusing on building cleaners and their global experiences • Brings together an international group of scholars and experts to investigate different national contexts and examples • Draws out important commonalities and highlights significant differences in these experiences • Examines topics including erosion of cleaners' industrial citizenship rights, the impact of outsourcing upon their working conditions, economic security, and the intensification of their work and its negative effects on physical health • Considers how cleaners are mobilizing to resist and respond to the restructuring of their work.
Research on legitimacy in studies of organizations, institutions, and industries is marked by a proliferation of terms and categories and often confounds issues of evaluation, contestation, and legality, particularly in addressing industries and legitimacy. We connect an institutional conception of societal logics with standard conceptions of industry belief systems to present a framework and research strategy for examining the multilevel enactment of belief systems and discursive struggles central to the legitimacy dynamics of industries. We illustrate this framework with evidence from the U.S. tobacco and gambling industries to identify and interpret recurring legitimacy struggles. As such, we offer an example of how to better understand legitimacy issues by expanding the levels through which we examine processes of debate and evaluation.
Management fashions are transitory collective beliefs - disseminated by management-fashion-setters (consultants, journalists, gurus, scholars) -- that a management technique leads management progress. We study three features of fashion-setters' discourse launching the Quality Circle fashion: its lifecycle, forces triggering its lifecycle stages, and the type of collective learning it fostered.
In this article, the process leading to decriminalization of pornography in Sweden in 1971 is analyzed. The interplay between the structural institutional level and company behavior is stressed, with an emphasis on business strategies. The article shows that the division between hard-core and soft-core pornographic magazines in Sweden was quite different than the development in the United Kingdom and the United States. It also shows how the business strategies used by hard-core pornographers challenged the obscenity legislation and regulation of national distribution, making them obsolete. Even though there was fierce competition between the pornography companies, producers formed joint alternative distribution channels crucial to the survival of the industry.
Norms provide a powerful mechanism for regulating conflict in groups, even when there are more than two people and no central authority. This paper investigates the emergence and stability of behavioral norms in the context of a game played by people of limited rationality. The dynamics of this new norms game are analyzed with a computer simulation based upon the evolutionary principle that strategies shown to be relatively effective will be used more in the future than less effective strategies. The results show the conditions under which norms can evolve and prove stable. One interesting possibility is the employment of metanorms, the willingness to punish someone who did not enforce a norm. Many historical examples of domestic and international norms are used to illustrate the wide variety of mechanisms that can support norms, including metanorms, dominance, internalization, deterrence, social proof, membership in groups, law, and reputation. © 1986, American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
As if in a magic trick, the patient vanishes, hidden behind machines and tubes, there unseen by doctors and nurses. But as in any good magic trick, the patient also reappears . . .
(Zussman, 1992: 81)
The opening quote summarises how ethnographies of hospital intensive care units emphasise the ways in which the bodies of patients are made visible and invisible (Place, 2000; Zussman, 1992).1 This is especially evident during their admission and through the ways in which bodies are rendered legible via biomedical technology and organisational processes (White, 2008). In this chapter we locate our analysis of the body within the space of intensive care. Here, critically ill persons are located within a complex circuit where bodies are de-corporealised and de-subjectivised through technology.
This chapter draws on ethnographic research carried out in sex shops1 located in London’s Soho, an area that has been at the heart of the capital’s sex industry for over 200 years. As a place of ‘backstreet industry and below stairs debauchery’ (Richardson, 2000: 57), the sex industry dominates both the actual and perceived character of Soho. The area occupies only a square mile of London’s West End, yet its political, economic and cultural reach is considerable, and the area continues to have a global association with commercial sex.
Standing in the magnolia painted corridor I wait a moment to let the elderly gentleman pass-by. Stepping forward I knock on the door of the consulting room. ‘Come in’. I enter to find Jo (Advanced Nurse Practitioner) aerosol in hand, wafting floral scents around the room. Smiling she greets me: ‘Hello, come in, take a seat’. Pointing with her eyes to the aerosol she continues ‘sorry about this, just lanced a boil. Poor pet [colloquial reference to the patient who just left]: a great big thing in his arm pit’. Opening the window as we both sit she adds ‘there’s something very satisfying about lancing a boil, but the smell is terrible [grinning]and I don’t want the next patient thinking that smell is me!’.
The NASA spacecraft New Horizons performed a historic, close-up flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto on July 14, after a 3 billion-mile journey that took nearly 10 years. Telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, have never been able to observe Pluto as much more than a smudgy ball. Now, pictures snapped as the craft flew 7,750 miles above the planet’s surface are providing incredible details of Pluto, indicating that it and its large moon Charon are geologically active. Instead of being pockmarked by impact craters, large surface areas on Pluto and Charon appear remarkably smooth, having been coated by some as-yet-unknown process. The discovery is significant because it implies that these two distant icy bodies have a heat source driving geological activity. In all other cases of smooth-surfaced icy bodies, such as Neptune’s moon Triton, heat is produced by tidal forces caused by the gravity of a nearby giant planet. ...
According to Curt Moreck's Sittengeschichte des Kinos, the first authoritative study of pornographic motion pictures, Budapest after the turn of the twentieth century was the principal source of the stag film, the precursor of today's triple-X video.1 Stag films may have appeared as early as 1899, probably in France. Made in ten-minute lengths of black-and-white 35 mm film stock that fit on a single, easily smuggled reel, the silent stag depicted hard-core intercourse interspersed with raucous intertitles. Crude and demotic, clandestinely made and distributed stags seemed to confirm the historian Erwin Panofsky's contention that cinema itself had its origins in obscene folklore and pornographic art.2 Although the total number shot did not exceed a few dozen per decade before World War II, classic stags persisted into the 1950s, then mutated into 8 mm shorts, theatrical features, and eventually VCR and DVD formats. In 1910, said Moreck, Hungarians exported stags to other countries on the Continent. But Budapest's first film vogue did not last long: by the 1920s Hungary's stag filmmakers had been displaced by those of Argentina, Austria, France, and the United States. Now, a century later, erotic scenarios on cassette and DVD from Hungary again constitute a distinctive market niche and have resurrected a European eroticism eclipsed by American industrialization of sexual representation. Convinced that Budapest is now the "center of the porno world," filmmakers from across Europe have moved there to exploit the city's resources, even as domestic entrepreneurs have launched their own companies.3 Nearly a quarter of all pornographic videos produced in Europe are made in and around Budapest, and most of the reigning Continental porn queens are Hungarian. Although history is instructive here, the success of "Budaporn" has less to do with a resurgence of Mitteleuropean decadence following the collapse of the Soviet Union than with the imperatives of globalization. Europeans are altering the content of pornography and creating new icons of desire just as globalization is visibly reshaping pornographic industries by expanding demand, increasing production, consolidating distribution, and exploiting new locations. Over the last decade cross-border traffic in hard-core video has soared, giving credence to the Economist's 1998 prediction that pornography would become a standard component of the world's entertainment systems early in the twentyfirst century.4 Pornography has fueled Continental cable and satellite television growth since 1991, when Variety noted that European media had exhausted the world's stock of soft-core films and had begun exhibiting hard-core.5 American systems were forced to follow suit. Long resistant to hard-core, staid Playboy Enterprises in 2001 purchased three explicit satellite sex services capable of reaching 100 million households; its stock price rose instantly.6 Now American and European hotel chains routinely offer graphic movies on pay-per-view channels. The only bright spot on the otherwise dismal balance sheet of Vivendi, the troubled French media giant, is the revenue generated by porn features shown on its subsidiary, Canal Plus.7 Even so, the sheer number of hard-core films (called films de charme) shown each month on French television (though after midnight) has provoked a backlash from conservatives.8 Finland's Helsinki Television, a cable monopoly, only recently started charging for two late-night hard-core channels that had run for nearly ten years free to subscribers.9 The Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies in Rome reported in 2001 that 37 percent of Italian women switched on porn channels during the day (not simply at night); the study predicted that female audiences for televised hard-core would increase by 10 percent over the following two years. Demand for home consumer VCR tapes and DVDs is especially strong in countries that still prohibit cable and over-the-air exhibition. Heightened circulation ended Britain's long-standing prohibitions against hard-core videotapes in 2000.11 More than 300 adult stores have opened in South Africa,12 and adult tapes and DVDs are available clandestinely in many other nations on the African continent. In June 2002 authorities in southern China seized 5.2 million pirated pornographic DVDs being unloaded in the port of Huizhou, though officials were motivated in part by the intellectual property protocols enforced by the World Trade Organization, to which China had been recently admitted.13 In any case distributors such as Nanma operate in Hong Kong despite the colony's takeover by the Communists. Black market distribution of pornography in the Middle East is difficult to track, but robust demand is evident in that religiously conservative region as well. Despite far from uniform laws and customs (e.g., in Italy production of porn is theoretically prohibited), erotic videos move freely among nations of the European Union. Partly to protect minors but just as obviously to protect the traffic in sexual materials for adults, the European Parliament in 2001 passed new guidelines for dealing with child pornography in the fifteen EU nations, including prison terms for those convicted of sexually exploiting children.14 With only a few exceptions, European producers now follow the lead of their American counterparts by insisting on compliance with Section 2257 of the U.S. Code, which requires records proving the age of every performer. That legislation, though originally drawn by hostile political conservatives, has in effect stabilized the industry by defining legal adult content.15 As a result, the Continental porn market is robust despite dislocations to be expected in the new economic bloc. Demand has in fact increased the number of European porn producers, although they are still outnumbered by Americans. The European nations combined produce no more than twelve hundred porn videos per year (estimates differ), of which approximately three hundred come from Hungary.16 By contrast, the United States turned out around eleven thousand soft- and hard-core videos in 2001; Vivid Video, for example, itself releases four features per week.17 Japan probably produces more; some estimates place the number of cheap tapes as high as fourteen thousand per year.18 Numbers are deceiving, however, because many poorly shot American and Japanese videos are highly fetishistic (as in Japanese bondage scenarios in which yards of ropes and knots obscure flesh) and thus attract limited numbers of consumers. Moreover, says a representative of Scala Agenturn, one of the largest European distributors, the general run of American videos is of such low technical quality that only about 10 percent is "saleable in Europe,"19 and the percentage of exportable Japanese products is lower yet. Some 150 American companies are now clustered in Chatsworth, California, dubbed "Silicone Valley." Of these, five or six (e.g., Vivid Video, Metro, VCA, and Evil Angel) vertically integrate production, postproduction, packaging, and distribution and thus control the lion's share of the market. European producers are scattered across the European Union, with studios located in France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark as well as Hungary and the Czech Republic, both of which joined the European Union in 2004. Unification has allowed producers to make use of peripatetic performers and technicians, to seek capital from banks of many nationalities, and to incorporate in countries with favorable tax rates and economic incentives. Some countries are more receptive than others, of course, and the French experience is instructive. During the early 1970s France suddenly found itself inundated with American movies such as Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972), whose immense box office successes threatened a corps of domestic producers (such as Jess Franco and Jean Rollin) that were just then shifting from traditional soft-core to more explicit features. In 1975 the French retaliated with Jean François Davy's Exhibition, a graphic documentary that opened at the New York Film Festival, and Danille Bellus's Pussy Talk, a tale of a loquacious vagina that did well at box offices around the world. The following year, however, confused by such developments, the French government adopted contradictory policies. On the one hand, the Giscard administration ended censorship of sexual films and attempted to protect the French porn industry by subjecting American imports to very high tariffs.
Since its establishment in 1949, the People's Republic of China has upheld a nationwide ban on pornography, imposing harsh punishments on those caught purchasing, producing, or distributing materials deemed a violation of public morality. A provocative contribution to Chinese media studies by a well-known international media researcher, People’s Pornography offers a wide-ranging overview of the political controversies surrounding the ban, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the many distinct media subcultures that have gained widespread popularity on the Chinese Internet as a result. Rounding out this exploration of the many new tendencies in digital citizenship and pornography and activist media cultures in the greater China region are thought-provoking interviews with individuals involved. A timely contribution to the existing literature on sexuality, Chinese media, and Internet culture, People’s Pornography provides a unique angle on the robust voices involved in the debate over about pornography’s globalization.
Book synopsis:
This book explores new understandings and contemporary experiences of dirty work – tasks or roles that are seen to be disgusting or degrading. Through novel empirical sites that include nursing, medicalization, sex workers, sex call operators, financiers and women's magazines, the book offers new theoretical insights into a form of work that is increasing in significance in the contemporary labour market. By drawing on concepts such as staining, embodiment and 'whiteness', it complicates the clean/dirty divide in the context of work and contributes to understandings of dirty work as contingent, fluid and socially constructed. It offers rich insights into the complex ways in which such work is experienced and the variety of strategies drawn on as dirty workers seek to manage identity.
This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.
Public and academic debate about 'porn culture' is proliferating. Ironically, what is often lost in these debates is a sense of what is specific about pornography. By focusing on pornography's mainstream - contemporary commercial products for a heterosexual male audience - Everyday Pornography offers the opportunity to reconsider what it is that makes pornography a specific form of industrial practice and genre of representation. Everyday Pornography presents original work from scholars from a range of academic disciplines (Media Studies, Law, Sociology, Psychology, Women's Studies, Political Science), introducing new methodologies and approaches whilst reflecting on the ongoing value of older approaches. Among the topics explored are: the porn industry's marketing practices (spam emails, reviews) and online organisation. commercial sex in Second Life. the pornographic narratives of phone sex and amateur videos. the content of best-selling porn videos. how the male consumer is addressed by pornography, represented within the mainstream, understood by academics and contained by legislation. This collection places a particular emphasis on anti-pornography feminism, a movement which has been experiencing a revival since the mid-2000s. Drawing on the experiences of activists alongside academics, Everyday Pornography offers an opportunity to explore the intellectual and political challenges of anti-pornography feminism and consider its relevance for contemporary academic debate.
The State of Sex is a study of Nevada's brothels that situates the nation's only legal brothel industry in the political economy of contemporary tourism. Nevada is part of the "new American heartland," as its pastimes, people, and politics have become more central to the nation. The rise of a service and leisure economy over the past sixty years has propelled sexuality into the heart of contemporary markets. Yet, neoliberal laws in the United States promote business but limit sexual commerce. How have Nevada's legal brothels survived, while the rest of the country criminalizes prostitution? How do brothels operate? Who works in them? This book brings social theory on globalizing economies, politics, leisure consumption, and emotional labor in interactive service work together with research on contemporary prostitution and sexual commerce. The authors employ an innovative, multi-method sociological approach, combining historical analysis of how the brothels came to be with over a decade's worth of ethnographic research on the current state of the industry.
It is generally accepted that a family's involvement in the business makes the family business unique; but the literature continues to have difficulty defining the family business. We argue for a distinction between theoretical and operational definitions. A theoretical definition must identify the esence that distinguishes the family business from other businesses. It is the standard against which operational definitions must be measured. We propose a theoretical definition based on behavior as the essence of a family business. Our conceptual analysis shows that most of the operational definitions based on the components of family involvement overlap with our theoretical definition. Our empirical results suggest, however, that the components of family involvement typically used in operational definitions are weak predictors of intentions and, therefore, are not always reliable for distinguishing family businesses from non-family ones.
Corporations can respond to expectations for socially responsible processes and outcomes in organizationally integrated ways or in easily decoupled fashion. This study focused on a particular type of socially responsible organizational process: formal corporate ethics programs. Theory suggests that external pressures for social performance encourage easily decoupled processes but that top management commitments can encourage both easily decoupled and integrated processes. Analysis of survey and archival data generally supported this position. Implications for social performance research, practice, and public policy are discussed.