Suchergebnisse

This article examines young men's concepts of status in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focussing in particular on their concept of 'style'. The article shows how young men experience their position in the life cycle as between childhood and adulthood, and how this liminality mediates their concepts of status. In particular, I focus on the construction of the youth peer group as in distinction to, and transgressive of, the forms of adult respectability, propriety and authority from which young men are excluded by virtue of their age. I show how the peer group is marked by a productive tension between transgression and self-differentiation, and reciprocity, intimacy and peer pressure. The article then turns to two kinds of source material for young men's performances of status: English-Tamil slang and counterfeit global brands. I show how the tension between, and negotiation of, the mandates to status-raise and status-level in the peer group transform and revalourise these signs of status. The article concludes by arguing that while from afar, such youth practice seems to be negotiating globalisation, modernity and tradition, a close analysis of peer-group dynamics shows that youth practice is more centrally concerned with peer-group status negotiations.

AbstractThis paper examines whether the ex post relative payoffs of peers as well as the size of the peer group impact an agent's willingness to take risks. For example, persons in a flood plain may be less likely to purchase flood insurance if their neighbors also refrain from purchasing. We generalize the Fehr‐Schmidt (1999) model to allow the intensity of the social preferences to vary with the size of the peer group. Our experiment tests whether subjects are more or less likely to choose a lottery over a fixed payment when others have been assigned either the same lottery or the fixed payment. Using both between and within subject designs, we find risk‐taking behaviour is not responsive to the risks faced by others regardless of the size of peer group.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop an interpretative framework of induction as a social practice to examine the ecology of the human and non-human actors involved in the production of induction as a social effect.


Design/methodology/approach
Three case studies are conducted in different types of organizations (private, public and network) to analyse the relation between the induction process and the actors that influence it.


Findings
Three different models of induction are described: in a professional bureaucracy, socialization precedes selections and the key actor is the profession; in a small private organization, induction is almost exclusively managed by the peer group in the form of seduction by the profession; in a large network of organizations, induction is explicitly managed by the organization and becomes a means to transmit the organizational culture.


Research limitations/implications
In the description of the empirical data, it is shown how an individual undergoes induction into the organization when he/she undergoes seduction (by the profession). Nevertheless, the models could be improved by the study of a larger sample of organizations.


Originality/value
This paper shows that induction is not the effect of solely the encounter between individual and organization, because two other agents are involved in the process, namely the profession and the peer group.

AbstractTo investigate the social cognitive skills related to challenging gender stereotypes, children (N = 61, 3–6 years) evaluated a peer who challenged gender stereotypic norms held by the peer's group. Participants with false belief theory of mind (FB ToM) competence were more likely than participants who did not have FB ToM to expect a peer to challenge the group's stereotypes and propose that the group engage in a non‐stereotypic activity. Further, participants with FB ToM rated challenging the peer group more positively. Participants without FB ToM did not differentiate between their own and the group's evaluation of challenges to the group's stereotypic norms, but those with ToM competence asserted that they would be more supportive of challenging the group norm than would the peer group. Results reveal the importance of social‐cognitive competencies for recognizing the legitimacy of challenging stereotypes, and for understanding one's own and other group perspectives.

We study the effect of a new university in a two‐city model in which individuals' utility depends on own ability, peer group ability, formal education and mobility costs. We compare a monopoly (one university in one city) with a two‐university system (one university in each city). Introducing the second university improves welfare when the fixed cost of each university is low. With two universities, we obtain a symmetric equilibrium for every mobility cost and asymmetric equilibria for low mobility costs. The symmetric system induces the highest welfare and is also Strong Nash (for high mobility costs).