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Purpose – Religious addiction treatment has experienced a rise both in its reach and exposure to attention from medical professionals. Largely autonomous conversion-based programs have received unprecedented support and legitimacy. We investigate “Victory Ministries,”11The organization ‘Victory Ministries’ is a pseudonym. Any resemblance to actual locales of this name or similar is entirely coincidental. All names have been change to protect the identity of the participants. a large Midwestern evangelical rehab facility, exploring the similarities and differences between formulations of addiction-as-disease found in “secular” rehab and the moral binaries that guide Victory's program.

Methodology/approach – Qualitative case study: Interviews and ethnography.

Findings – Working from in-depth interviews, we explore the inner workings of Victory's curriculum and program design, as it transmutes dominant therapeutic concepts and methods into its own Manichaean frame. Aided by superior financial resources and support of a tight-knit network of churches, it delivers its most successful clients into a new life “redeemed by Christ.”

Social implications – Proponents of conversion-based service provision position religious institutions as the primary agents of willing compassion and generosity beyond the family compass, stripping the rest of civil society of any claims to promote the greater good. In Victory's metaphor of “invisible war,” a Manichaean vision is quite explicit. Every definition of recovery and reintegration in terms of conversion and submission to religious authority inherently suggests that substance use stems largely from immorality and that the unsaved in general are sinful and dangerous. By funding a conversion-based shadow welfare apparatus, we argue, the US government is intensifying the criminalization of poverty, the steady downgrading of more inclusive institutions, and ultimately the materialization of Victory's Manichaean vision in a polarized nation.

Purpose – Since the mid-20th century, drug addiction in America has increasingly been redefined as a disease and diagnosed as a widespread yet treatable disorder. The idiosyncrasies of addiction as a disease, however, have tended to block the journey of the addict from stigmatized moral failure to therapeutic reprieve. Centering in on the process of the “court-led diagnosis” of addiction, this qualitative case study uses ethnography and interviewing at a county drug court and one of its “partner” therapeutic communities to examine the process in detail, from the first negotiations between treatment and court personnel over the eligibility of the client, to the gradual inculcation of an addict identity by means of intensive cognitive education and behavioral modification.

Methodology/approach – Qualitative: ethnography and interviews.

Findings – We demonstrate that a shift from moral judgment to therapeutic sympathy is particularly unlikely for the fast-growing mass of criminal offenders whose diagnosis is spearheaded by the state in the form of the therapeutic jurisprudence of the drug court. For this group, the emphasis on the need for comprehensive resocialization and the close cooperation between the intimacies of therapeutic “rehab” and the strong arm of criminal justice “backup” not only maintains, but intensifies, moral tutelage, and stigmatization.

Social implications – The convergence of drug treatment and criminal justice tends to produce yet another stigmatizing biologization of poverty and race, lending scientific validity to new forms of criminalizing and medicalizing social hardship.

An early morning at Bryant Salvage, a Vietnamese recycling business, finds a variety of San Francisco's scavengers converging to sell their findings. Vehicle after vehicle enters the yard to be weighed on the huge floor scale before dumping its load in the back; ancient pick‐up trucks with wooden walls, carefully loaded laundry carts, canary Cadillacs stuffed to overflow with computer paper, the shopping carts of homeless men, a 1950s ambulance carrying newspaper, and even the occasional gleaming new truck. The homeless men unload their towers of bottles and cardboard while young Latino van recyclers shout jokes across them. Middle aged Vietnamese women in jeans and padded jackets buzz around on forklifts or push around great tubs full of bottles and cans, stopping occasionally to help elderly people with their laundry carts. The van recyclers repeatedly honk their horns at the homeless guys to get out of the way. The homeless recyclers, silently methodical in their work, rarely respond.

Informal economic activities appear to constitute a growing component of all economic transactions in the US and some other industrialized nations, despite the traditional view that such activities would dissipate with advanced capitalism (cf Castells and Portes 1989, Tanzi 1982). The study of these activities, particularly by sociologists, has likewise grown in recent years. For example, at the 1995 ASA annual meetings in Washington DC, a formal session was devoted entirely to such work, an annual feature of recent vintage. That year's session produced some six papers, five case studies with a US focus and a general typology on informal work, which are reviewed here. As a group, these papers provide numerous insights into various aspects of informal work in the US. Yet, in the end, they raise at least as many questions as they answer, no doubt a reflection of the infancy of the field of study.

It is fascinating to think about the growth of the literature on the informal economy since Hart and Ferman and Ferman first considered the problem in very different contexts in the early 1970's. In fact some intellectual history would probably be appealing for students of this literature. Irrespective of the knowledge gained from conducting an intellectual history, social scientists should be aware that many, if not most, of the empirical and theoretical problems they study have roots in different philosophical problems (Leaf, 1979). The “informal” economy is no exception. To situate the following collection of articles on the informal economy in one useful philosophical context, I will discuss in this introduction two distinct strategies of social science investigation. Having spelled out these strategies, I will then consider how each of the papers stands in relation to them.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the many techniques used by physicians and psychiatrists to diagnose patients involved external and highly public examination. Typically conducted as a lecture to other medical experts and students, the patient was placed in the center of a round room with onlookers arranged in tiered seating to guarantee an unobstructed view. As the lead physician detailed the list of symptoms, using the patient's body as an illustration, observers witnessed the behavioral signs for themselves and discussed the possible underlying conditions or pathologies. This process of consultation and naming worked to increase the relative reliability among experts and bolster the professional reputations of medicine and psychiatry alike (Conrad & Schneider, 1992; Gillis, 2006; Grob & Horwitz, 2010). As researchers have noted (Aronowitz, 2001; Foucault, 1973), this change from focusing on disparate, idiosyncratic symptoms as expressions of individual illness to a system that recognized disease states comprised of symptom clusters marks a historical turning point in the history of medicine. The shift toward a classification scheme that linked medicine with science and technology bolstered medical authority and the power of physicians. In addition to professional credentials, accumulated knowledge, and institutional legitimacy, the authority of modern medicine both rests on and is expressed by medicine's decisive power to name and categorize through diagnosis (Jutel, 2009). Even as medical prestige has eroded, ceding some of its power to other entities,¹ physicians remain the final arbiter of official medical categories (Pescosolido, 2006), judges of what is, and what is not, a “real” diagnosis. In the diagnostic process, one looks within to reveal the nature of disease from without – empirical observation becomes immutable fact. Of course, as critical perspectives on medicine have long pointed out (Conrad & Schneider, 1992; Zola, 1972), the scientific “fact” of one time and place is the mythology or ignorance of another. Diagnosis, as both category and process (Blaxter, 1978), is infused with all manner of things social, historical, and cultural. This volume explores some of these infusions. In so doing, it aims to clarify and contribute to the emerging sociology of diagnosis – an endeavor first called for by Brown (1990), but more recently revived by Jutel (2009).

Economic theory and practice profess that corruption is a crime of calculation, normally perpetrated for economic gain. Policy responses, as a consequence, revolve around the restrictions and incentives needed to curb economic opportunities and restrain impulses leading to corruption. Nevertheless, the sciences of politics and management have long brooded over it, noting that power can corrupt, corruption can empower, corruptors can wield manifold instruments, and the satisfaction of pride is one of them. This paper aims to focus on corruption not as an end but as an instrument of power.

This paper aims at analysing the deeper nature of corruption and the tools made use of to explain and address it. Accordingly it explores the limits of political integrity, the notions of democracy, the constraints of economic theory to fully interpret corruption and its variegated manifestations, and the alleged singularity of the ethics of politicians.

Political authorities in liberal democracies are expected to act with the consent of their constituencies and as a consequence of it. Constituencies in turn cannot disown what their authorities decide and do, at least in the long run. However, although certain prerogatives can be delegated on authorities, the responsibility of electorates cannot be delegated. Awareness of this double‐sided, principal‐agent co‐responsibility is what gathers together in mature societies mounting preoccupation for the integrity of political and administrative authorities.

The paper concludes that honesty and corruption in political authority and civil service are counter figure and reflection of the material organisation of power in a given society, time and geography. Public politics, through constant scrutiny of political and administrative actors, processes and actions, puts individual innocence to the test. That is, societies cannot be excused for the performance of their representatives because, by selecting some candidates for public office and some courses of action over others, they are also deciding on a collective story that stands as an evolving moral narration.

Drawing on social identity theory, this study aims to disentangle the values and prestige-related mechanisms through which an organization's external corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to increased employee participation in, and communication of, CSR. The moderating effect of internally-directed CSR initiatives on employees' external CSR (ECSR) behaviors is also examined.

A longitudinal survey of 196 employees was conducted and structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to assess the relationship between ECSR and employee CSR engagement.

The relationship between employee perceptions of ECSR and the employee perceptions' engagement in CSR was fully mediated by value congruence, but not by the organization's perceived external prestige. The effects of ECSR on both value congruence and prestige were stronger when employees also experienced high levels of internal CSR (ICSR).

When employees perceive consistency in the respective organizations' external and ICSR efforts, this strengthens the employees' initial beliefs about the firm's values and reputation and enhances employees' willingness to promote the employees' company's CSR initiatives to organizational outsiders.

This study advances the authors' theoretical understanding of why, and when, organizational CSR initiatives generate greater CSR engagement among employees.