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The purpose of this article is to analyse how the seemingly natural fit between Japan and the soft power concept has been possible despite the notorious vagueness of the concept and what the consequences of soft power's reification are. By building on recent scholarship on concepts, expert knowledge and narratives, the article suggests that reification processes are best conceptualized as driven by concept coalitions. The article finds that soft power was narrated and nurtured into Japan's cultural diplomacy, Japan's relationship with the United States (US) and its security policy. The article, moreover, shows that the more soft power was understood, framed and accepted as benign and necessary, the more persuasive arguments about what Japan should do or be in order to wield soft power became. This has legitimized narratives that suggest that Japan's 'proactive contribution to peace' as a responsible ally of the US constitutes an inevitable source of soft power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As other countries continue to expand cultural, medical, and legal distinctions of gender, practices of the United States often reify the gender binaiy. Subsequently, this Article underscores the need for a critical interdisciplinary examination of the gender binary and its effects on the (re)production of gender stereotypes in media, within the medical sciences, and in law. By exploring the cultural, medical, and legal reification of the gender binary, we argue that the United States healthcare system should begin to acknowledge the spectrum of gender and to broaden patients' legal protections regarding non-disclosure and privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • New teachers demonstrated only a partial disruption of dominant ideologies. • Identities of resistance drew on Disability Studies in Education frameworks. • Identities of reification perpetuated ableism and justified exclusion. • Teacher preparation must address tensions between special and inclusive education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Fuzzy and investigative ecological boundaries are reconstituted as absolute and tangible when used to inform natural resource management policies. The process of treating symbolic representations of ecological discontinuities as if they were authentic reflections of reality represents a process of reification and may lead to inappropriate policy provisions with adverse local ecological and social consequences. This essay describes how the United States Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program takes the 100th meridian-a simplified representation of the ambiguous gradient between the non-arid East from the arid West-and hardens it into a concrete boundary where farmers follow different rules depending on what side of the boundary they reside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents study which explores the effects and social control potential of biopsychiatry on medicalization scholarship in the U.S. Medicalization thesis were reviewed to determine the link between social control processes and medical definitions. Findings show that a biomedical model that will enhance psychiatry's scientific aura will be opened in the shift of dynamic to diagnostic psychiatry but the dangers of social control will be intensified with the ordinariness of diagnoses.