Suchergebnisse

Adoption stories, like other narratives, seek to establish a child's linear life course. As such, they attempt to encapsulate a biological beginning, a birth point. This point allows certain attributes which are assumed to be fixed and static, such as sex and ethnicity, to be ascribed to the child and these are often taken to be fundamental to the unfolding narrative. Using qualitative research with families who live in England and have adopted daughters from China, Sarah Richards explores the narratives of belonging with the girls themselves and their parents. These belonging stories are shaped by reification of biological parentage and of birth heritage that reflects the social and political context in which adoption stories are told.

This article explores how the London Olympic Bid Committee (LOBC) sought to gain the popular support required for London's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games by attempting to influence the journalists of the U.K. newspaper with the greatest readership to communicate their discourse to the host urban population. The research draws on Michel Foucault's concept of discourse to investigate whether and, more importantly, how the journalists of the Sun articulated the key statements that the LOBC sought to convey to the U.K. public in their coverage of London's bid for the 2012 Games in order to discover how collusion and tension between the discourses and practices of bid committees and those of journalists affect the statements articulated to the reader.

AbstractIn light of cross‐cultural and experimental research highlighting effects of childrearing practices on infant motor skill, we asked whether wearing diapers, a seemingly innocuous childrearing practice, affects infant walking. Diapers introduce bulk between the legs, potentially exacerbating infants' poor balance and wide stance. We show that walking is adversely affected by old‐fashioned cloth diapers, and that even modern disposable diapers – habitually worn by most infants in the sample – incur a cost relative to walking naked. Infants displayed less mature gait patterns and more missteps and falls while wearing diapers. Thus, infants' own diapers constitute an ongoing biomechanical perturbation while learning to walk. Furthermore, shifts in diapering practices may have contributed to historical and cross‐cultural differences in infant walking.

AbstractThis article explores the synergies between place branding and agricultural landscape management as a rural development practice. We hypothesise that place branding strategy can be used as a process to combat the homogenisation of regions and help to build networks and institutions that strengthen rural development. In order to explore these synergies an extended case study was undertaken in four Belgian regions that display major differences in their place branding processes and agricultural characteristics. The research revealed that in all four cases vital coalitions are being formed between the organisations involved in place branding and local farmers, and that both parties have benefited as a result. Intensive and transparent communication within the place branding process has proven to be essential in strengthening these synergies.

In the aftermath of the great recession, progressive HR executives represent a key partner to executives looking to do more with less. As the need for increasingly agile and cost- effective reward structures expand in strategic importance, top business leaders and consultants are turning more and more to non-cash rewards and recognition. Research shows that top-performing organizations are using travel, merchandise and gift cards to augment current reward structures and impact near-term success. And they are doing so with great success. By following eight basic events in the design and implementation of non-cash reward and recognition programs, all organizations can build a cost-effective reward portfolio that captures key talent and, most importantly, business results.

As natural-technological catastrophes become increasingly complex in their severity, scale, and duration, so too must our policy responses. Utilizing the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a case study, this paper explores the ecological, sociocultural, and political challenges from an interdisciplinary perspective. Consistent with prior research on catastrophes, the findings of this study indicate that the severity of disruption substantially influences the social construction of the occasion as policy actors are ill equipped to handle the challenges at all levels of government. Drawing their interdisciplinary backgrounds in history, political science, sociology, anthropology, communications, and literary studies, the authors offer an integrative policy solutions approach predicated on a model of network governance.

In the following text the theoretical conception, the employed analysis methods and some first results of the research project "The Emotionalization of Religion" are presented. The aim of the project is to compare newer Christian congregations with a Pentecostal or evangelical orientation to Christian parishes affiliated with the Evangelical Church in Germany or the Roman Catholic Church with regard to their respective emotional culture. The employed method set includes several qualitative methods, such as videoanalysis, the analysis of guideline interviews and participant observation. A particular focus lies within the empirical paragraph on the question: What role do new types of media usage in Christian parishes play for the development, representation and analysis of new emotional styles?

Research indicates that successful government contracting depends on sufficient internal management capacity. Numerous studies have examined the decision to contract out and its pitfalls, but few have tracked government contract management capacity. This study explores whether a change is observable in the capacity of U.S. local governments to engage in effective contracting from 1997 to 2007. The authors discuss whether this change represents a decline or degradation, and in which form and type of government it occurred. Using data from 537 local government units, the analysis reveals that some aspects of capacity have declined as local governments continue to contract out for highly complex services. The authors speculate on the reasons behind the findings and suggest capacity enhancement strategies.

For generations, sociological theorists have debated the relative function, utility, and harm of social conflict and its resolution. This review identifies some of the most prominent among recent contested forms of conflict resolution as well as their social histories, worldviews, and ways of operating. In sorting out the myriad theoretical traditions and positions guiding this field, we note that the resolution of social conflict is a thing in itself, and hence any design of its study should be directed at this liminal moment during which change is occurring. We conclude by examining four aspects of resolution—violence, spatiality, temporality, and language—using these themes to demarcate fault lines or gaps in the literature and to suggest new directions for future research.

This paper examines the performance of 648 initial public offerings (IPOs) listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) from June 1992 to March 2002 over a five-year period. Voluminous research across the world suggests that IPOs unanimously witness very high returns in the short run; as opposed to it, the long-run performance of IPOs does not observe any ubiquitous pattern and this paper is an attempt to draw conclusions about the performance of IPOs in India. In order to get robust conclusions on IPO performance, the patterns of IPO performance have been analyzed for 60 months subsequent to listing. Furthermore, the study attempts to find out the factors that determine the performance of Indian IPOs.

A substantial portion of the world's people have not made adequate progress toward overcoming hunger or achieving sustainable livelihoods. The classic approach to addressing chronic food insecurity has been a strategy of agricultural development, supplemented by humanitarian assistance in the event of a shock or crisis—an approach predicated on assumptions that do not fit the context of protracted crises. This article describes protracted crises and argues that they are sufficiently different to warrant special consideration, but there are unique constraints to engagement in protracted crises. The article explores the constraints promoting sustainable livelihoods in these contexts and proposes elements of an alternative approach. It evaluates the limited evidence available about such an approach and outlines important questions for further research.

A growing but still limited body of research has examined the views and experiences of clients of sex workers. The current study is based on a content analysis of 2,442 postings on a popular forum where clients review sex workers and discuss their interactions with them. The article explores the reported experiences of a sample of clients who become involved in extended relationships with escorts and the emotional aspects of these associations. Findings show that there is a spectrum of experiences, ranging from counterfeit intimacy to an authentic emotional bond between the two parties. Many clients struggle with the unanticipated demands of an evolving romantic relationship and experience ongoing tension between its instrumental and expressive dimensions.

"{Im}materiality: Designing for More Sense/s" is an edited compilation of articles that explore the complexity of embodied human experience within the built environment. A particular aim of these collected works is to look toward how deepening one's understandings of the experiences of bodies in space and place can contribute to future built environments. The contributors to this special issue are trained in practice-based disciplines such as architecture, product development, and ergonomics. At the same time, they bring in particular theoretical backgrounds of research experience in anthropology, design history and theory, and sociology. They come together through a focus on heterogeneous experiences of disability to articulate themes and issues that illustrate immaterial connections to the material world.

AbstractPast studies have argued that in the large cities of developing societies, unemployment is often alleviated when displaced workers are absorbed into the small‐scale entrepreneurial activities of the informal economy. The present study applies this argument to an analysis of women's self‐employment in the U.S. South during the Great Depression. Census data show that in large southern cities in 1940, the unemployment of black women was meaningfully reduced by the self‐employment of these women in domestic service. These data further suggest that dynamics of race, unemployment, and the self‐employment of women in domestic service can be represented by an inverted‐U‐shaped labor absorption curve. These results make several contributions to research on race, labor‐market disadvantage, and self‐employment in the informal sector.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we examine the role of personal agency as a key antecedent of regret that individuals experience when the outcome of their decision is unfavorable. In contrast to previous research that documents its exacerbating role, we find that personal agencymitigatesregret under certain circumstances. A series of experimental studies show that personal responsibility for the decision may attenuate subjective perceptions of the extent of failure and mitigate regret. However, when the superior outcome of the foregone option is known and the failure of the chosen option is irreversible, personal agency may amplify regret. We also find that subjective failure perceptions mediate the relationship between personal agency and regret levels. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.