Suchergebnisse

Public acceptance is the basic premise for the implementation of stormwater reuse projects anywhere in the world. Based on the theory of planned behaviour, this study constructed a hypothesized model of urban residents' intention to use recycled stormwater for non-potable residential purposes. Having received 669 valid questionnaires from urban residents in Taiyuan City, a Structural Equation Model was used to analyze their acceptance intention to use recycled stormwater. Results of the study showed that the degree of human contact with recycled stormwater influenced respondents' acceptance intention to use it for that purpose, which is consistent with previous studies. The impact of factors, including valuation of stormwater, emotions, perceived health risks, or trust in government, on respondents' acceptance intention to use recycled stormwater was found to be not significant, which adds to the inconsistent literature. The unique contributions of the study to literature include that altruism and social and cultural norms were found to have significantly positive impacts on residents' acceptance intention to use the water, while social and cultural norms demonstrated a more significant impact. This finding is perceived to relate to the collectivism of Chinese culture; however, to what extent the relation could be requires further research to verify. The study also makes contributions to methodology by using social networking (WeChat Moments) to collect data in social science studies.

This paper develops a methodological framework to understand criminal laws as cultural artefacts—as manifestations of structures, processes and struggles which are part of the broader social (re)production of meanings, values and affects. The first section sets out the groundwork for a cultural examination of criminal law, deploying insights from cultural theory to understand criminal law's function in securing civil order. The paper then maps and critically analyses the cultural structure of the law of joint enterprise, which it argues is conditioned by a danger formation centred on the racialised and hostile construction of the image of the urban gang. The third section investigates the implications of this danger formation to the possibility of legal change through a cultural reading of the UK Supreme Court decision in R v Jogee. The paper concludes by reflecting on the value of a cultural understanding of criminal law.

AbstractThe main argument put forward in this paper is that traditional linguistic genre theories neglect the importance of media and their modal affordances in the formation of new genres. It argues that media cannot be viewed as (passive) configurations of technical, semiotic, and cultural features which are chosen by actors/ rhetors in order to serve their communicative needs, but rather as mediators whose modal affordances actively influence communicators' meaning making choices. In order to support this argument, it will be shown how forms of discourse representation gradually developed from a stylistic device in oral communication to a genre constitutive practice (e.g., in printed academic communication), and eventually became a genre of its own (as the practice of "sharing" content) in social media communication. In the analyses, the focus is on the interplay between modal affordances of the different media in which discourse representation formats are used, their formal properties, and pragmatic factors (like audience expectations in different communicative genres and situations). It is shown how innovative aspects of a medium influence formal features of discourse representation which in turn serve different communicative purposes in different genres.

Der Vergleich, obwohl eines der grundlegendsten Verfahren der Sozialwissenschaften, ist alles andere als eine unumstrittene Methode. Tatsächlich existiert nach wie vor ein enorm heterogenes Feld vergleichender Ansätze, die jeweils auf unterschiedliche intellektuelle Traditionen, verschiedenartige Verständnisse des "Vergleichens", spezifische Probleme und Forschungsstrategien bezogen sind. Verschiedene, auf ihre jeweilige Weise hochentwickelte komparative Forschungsrichtungen stehen so weitgehend unverbunden nebeneinander, wodurch letztlich analytische Potenziale verschenkt werden: ländervergleichende (häufig mit quantitativen Verfahren und erklärenden Zielsetzungen verknüpfte) Studien einerseits und kulturvergleichende (typischerweise mit qualitativen Verfahren und verstehend-hermeneutischen Anliegen verbundene) Ansätze andererseits. Die modernen Sozialwissenschaften sehen sich indes mit einer zunehmend komplexen globalen Wirklichkeit konfrontiert, die sich weniger als je zuvor adäquat auf der Grundlage einseitiger Referenzsysteme erfassen lässt. Vor diesem Hintergrund entwickeln wir in diesem Beitrag die Sozialraum- und Feldtheorie Pierre BOURDIEUs durch eine konsequent relationale Lesart in eine Richtung weiter, die es erlaubt, unterschiedliche Konzeptionen und Techniken des sozialwissenschaftlichen Vergleichs im Rahmen eines einheitlichen Bezugsrahmens zur Geltung zu bringen. Der Rückgriff auf diesen allgemeinen Bezugsrahmen eröffnet die Möglichkeit, nationale, internationale sowie transnationale Vergleiche anzustellen, ohne dabei die jeweiligen Referenzsysteme und die damit korrespondierenden Vergleichsentitäten essenzialisieren oder hypostasieren zu müssen.

This article explores Achebe's insertion of literary-theoretical discourse into traditional narrative space in Anthills of the Savannah with a view to demonstrating part of the limitless possibilities that the continental African novel pulsates with. It evokes the coexistence of narrative and literary-theoretical discourse in this particular novel through critical focus on selected characters' reflections on the place and role of the story and the storyteller in society, the entanglement of the story and the storyteller in political, cultural, and social issues, and the storyteller's freedom to imagine the contours of the story in keeping with cherished political, cultural, economic, and social priorities in African societies. Admittedly, Achebe addresses some of these issues in his literary-critical texts, but scholars of the continental African novel still have to contend with the ways in which continental African novelists utilize narrative space to theorize the novel as a genre. To that end, this article avers that Achebe's innovative co-optation of literary-theoretical issues into the narrative interstices of Anthills of the Savannah is exemplary in the development of both the continental African novel and literary-theoretical criteria that are instructive in the interpretation of this canon from an Afrocentric perspective.

This book takes a radical look at organizational crime and deviance through the prism of cultural theory derived from anthropology. It does so through case studies and by introducing new concepts such as 'organizational perversion', 'tyranny' and 'organizational capture'. Exploring the effects of change and environmental influences such as globalization, new technologies and trade-cycles on the nature and potency of criminogenic communities such as ports and holiday resorts, the book gives special attention to the justification of ethics and to the analysis of behaviours that have contributed.

Older women have never been so visible, or so problematised, in popular media culture as now; but what kinds of representations are being offered, and how can we make sense of them in the context of post-feminism and global economic change? Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations offers a timely intervention into the hiatus between the visibility of aging femininity in contemporary circuits of culture and its marginalisation in cultural theory. From ""graceful agers"" and Saga subscribers, to make-over models and pop divas, each of the essays in this collection interrogates the different

This new edition of The Afrocentric Idea boldly confronts the contemporary challenges that have been launched against Molefi Kete Asante's philosophical, social, and cultural theory. By rendering a critique of some post-modern positions as well as the old structured Eurocentric orientations discussed in the first edition, this new edition contains lively engagements with views expressed by Mary Lefkowitz, Paul Gilroy, and Cornel West. Expanding on his core ideas, Asante has cast The Afrocentric Idea in the tradition of provocative critiques of the established social order

Since the publication of his mammoth work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought, and is a key influence for modern literary and cultural theory. This guidebook provides an ideal entry-point for readers new to Heidegger, outlining such issues and concepts as:the limits of 'theory'the history of beingthe origin of the work of artlanguagethe literary workpoetry and the politicalHeidegger's involvement with Nazism.Fully updated throughout and featuring a new section on enviromental thought and ecocriticism, this guidebook clearly

Introduction: A new politics for a new century -- Part 1: Raw material for a politics and policy of moral conflict -- Status anxiety and political ideology -- Cultural theory and warring cultures -- Part 2: Morality politics by unconventional means -- Breaking into or breaking apart the political system -- Politicians strike back: legislative restraints on morality policy -- The juridicization of the morality policy process -- Bypassing elites: morality policy by Plebiscite -- Part 3: Uncompromising ends of morality policy -- Building political consensus and the public peace -- Conclusion: morality policy and Democratic governance.

Abstract The growing unrest regarding the social, political, economic and environmental state of affairs in Latin America suggests a deep challenge of the development model. Ideas about development matter because they seek to bring about social states by solving what are regarded as social ills. However, its definition is being increasingly disputed. This article makes sense of that plurality. Applying grid group cultural theory to this debate produces four irreducible ideal-typical worldviews and notions of development: market-led, state-led, multiple community-led, and a mirage.

The article discusses why the concept of 'ethnos' originated in the Russian Empire, and then in the second half of the 20th century, was developed in the USSR. The revival of the concept of 'ethnos' in the 1940s was caused by the need to solve such an applied problem as the drawing of post-war borders in post-war Eastern Europe. Later, Soviet ethnos theorists tried to combine incompatible Marxist ideas about the social class nature of society with the idea of an 'ethnos', close to Weber's understanding of an ethnic group, as a group with a specific culture and identity. At the turn of the 1980-1990s discussions began about the crisis of Soviet/Russian ethnology, primarily in the explanation of ethnicity, and several theorists suggested reorienting to the constructivist approach to ethnicity, which became dominant in English speaking science. The author considers the modern constructivist approach to ethnicity to be exhausted, since it failed to explain why members of ethnic minorities often prefer to self-identify with their ethnic ancestors more than with the states of which they are citizens, despite the efforts of states to reverse this orientation. It seems appropriate to abandon attempts to tie the ethnos to the social class structure of a particular socio-economic formation, that is, to abandon the concepts of 'nation' and 'nationality' ('narodnost'). In theoretical terms, it makes sense to rely on the criticalrealist theory developed by sociologists and representatives of other social sciences, which makes it possible to show the derivativeness of identities from structural and cultural factors and the reverse effect of identities on them. The use of the concept of 'ethnos' within the framework of such an approach has the advantage that it can describe the mechanism that leads to the possibility of the long-term existence of ethnic groups as important components of the social structure of society. Such a mechanism is the intergenerational transmission of ethnic identity, the core of which is ethnic self-identification, due to mono-ethnic marriages. And the most salient feature of this mechanism includes ideas of members of ethnic communities that ethnicity is associated with the ethnic origin of people and is transmitted, as it were, by inheritance from parents to children.