Suchergebnisse

Immigrant entrepreneurship may represent a means for diminishing the negative effects specific to the migration phenomenon and for emphasising the positive ones, contributing to the development of strong regions. The present paper outlines a series of information gathered through an ongoing complex and comprehensive research on immigrant entrepreneurship in Romania, approached from economic, social, institutional, and cultural perspectives. The major aim of the research is to provide a wide image on the investigated phenomenon in order to raise awareness among policymakers of its importance and complexity. The paper puts forward a series of empirical results obtained through the development of an econometrical analysis of statistical data and interview-based research. Results highlight a strong positive correlation between the number of enterprises (total and newly registered) and the number of immigrants in Romania. In this context, the hypothesis of the existence of another variable especially related to the socio-economic and legislative environments with an impact on both the number of enterprises and the one of immigrants may arise. Furthermore, in-depth explanations are provided by the carried out interviews. Debated issues refer to motivations, incentives, and obstacles in business development, cultural and social norms, commercial infrastructure, regulatory aspects, etc.

Este artículo hace una primera aproximación a los aportes desde la agroecología a un agro ecosistema integralmente sano, y cuestiona la bondad de las agriculturas de precisión y convencional en este sentido. Para el autor, un agro ecosistema integralmente sano es aquel simultáneamente saludable para los ecosistemas que lo sustentan, y para todos los seres e instituciones involucrados en la cadena de agregación de valor hasta el consumidor final y la cadena de retorno de residuos a los resumideros ecos sistémicos. Saludable en todas las dimensiones de la vida: territorial, ecológica, bio-psico-neuro-emocional, espiritual, cultural, tecnológica, social, política y económica. Abstract This article is a first approach to the contributions from agro ecology agro ecosystem to fully healthy, and questions the goodness of precision agriculture and conventional in this regard. For the author, a fully healthy agro ecosystem simultaneously is that healthy ecosystems that sustain it, and for all people and institutions involved in the chain of added value to the consumer and the chain of return of waste to drains ecosystem . Healthy in all aspects of life: territorial, environmental, bio-psycho-neuro-emotional, spiritual, cultural, technological, social, political and economic.

The meaning of a term "family" differs from one group of people to another and changes over time. The definition has important political, economic, social and ecological consequences, often determining family members' roles, rights and obligations. Maintaining and fostering the value of strong families ensures a sustainable development of a country. Strong family with stable values is an excellent instrument of resistance and adaptation to the external world and pressures. The study presents the survey done on bachelor program students' view on sustainability and how they maintain family values throughout the generations. This helps to build bridges over the traditional and the modernity aspects that emerge in the society's contemporary understanding of a family as a structural and spiritual unit. The methods of the research employed are the following: the study presents a qualitative research that comprises the content analyses of fifty six essays on a perception of a family by the bachelor programme students from one regional university of Latvia. The data is supported by the focus group interviews carried out with the full time students that are employed in the educational courses "Family pedagogy" and "Social pedagogy" (n = 111).

In this work the author discusses certain motivation aspects of the lower- and medium-level members of terrorist networks. It should be noted that the analysis of drivers for terrorist activity cannot be reduced to a single factor; in each case, a range of reasons, often interdependent and complementary, should be taken into account, as well as social, political and economic conditions "favorable" for the development of terrorism. Since the 1990s, and especially after 9/11, the studies of terrorism became more and more relevant. In this period, enormous research has been conducted regarding the logistics of a terrorist network, recruiting techniques and terrorist finance tracking. It has to be said that such research has greatly influenced the methods used today to fight terrorists in deep hiding. However, despite the ample analysis, scholars often miss one of the key elements of terrorism – the motivation of rank-and-file members of terrorist organizations that makes them give up their ambitions within the limits of universally accepted social behavior and seek to give way to their energy in the form of terrorism. Unlike the traditional criminal path which is chosen for lucrative reasons, participation in terrorist activities cannot be explained the same way.

The growing popularityof community land trusts as a mechanism for greater community participation in the control of local improvement is a particularly significant aspect of sustainable rural development in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Combining purposive selective interviews with members of a local Land Trust,observations at public meetings, anda review of recent literature on the development of the region, a case study of the Galson Estate Trust, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, is presented. Community ownership of land is seen as being instrumental in the shift inperceptions from short-term, marginal, externally-dependent activities towards solutions that are long-term (as indicated by schemes for renewable energy generation and environmental enhancement),core identity (seen as greater community confidence and enhanced local democracy) and locally driven developmental priorities (supported by revenue income streams). The process of local empowerment accompanying this shift in perceptions is regarded as having substantial benefits for social capital and skills acquisition at the community level. Early results from Trust activities indicate that ownership of the land, together withthe capacity-building process of communityparticipation in its management, has encouraged growth in a sense of local empowerment, together with providing employment, confidence, and other social improvements.

Political economy analysis has been a favourite instrument among donors of development aid since roughly the turn of the century. Donors have emphasised the usefulness of such forms of analysis because they realised that their focus on the formal aspects of the social and political organisation of countries had caused them to overlook important elements of the "political economy" of these countries. As a result, political and governance reform programmes, which had become part and parcel of the agenda of development under the post-Washington consensus, turned out to be much less effective than anticipated.The call for donor agencies to "look behind the façade" of formal institutions in developing countries has thus come as part of the aid effectiveness agenda. It was argued that the effectiveness of development assistance policies would be enhanced if the realities of social and political power structures in developing countries were mapped and fed into the design of governance reforms targeting those countries. A more or less tacit assumption was that political economy analysis would enable donors to identify potential pockets of resistance to the reforms that they were advocating – hence improving the chances of getting reforms accepted.

The globe's first carbon projects were designed and implemented approximately 20 years ago following scientific insights that emissions of greenhouse gases needed to be mitigated. Visible in some of these early projects were the important aspects of social governance and local benefit sharing. The projects promised to be a panacea to environmental, social and economic problems in remote rural areas of developing countries. However, it took another decade before a wave of hundreds of carbon projects were launched. Many of the projects were offered under the mechanism of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, plus the role of conservation, sustainable forest management and carbon enhancement), as well as under a variety of voluntary schemes and national programs, public-private partnerships, and forestry-based investment initiatives. As decision-makers prepare the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climatic Change in Paris (COP21), Earthscan has released a book entitled `Carbon conflicts and forest landscapes in Africa', edited by Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones. According to the editors, the focus of the book is on what happens on the ground when carbon forestry projects arrive, what types of projects work, and, equally important, what doesn't work.

After10 years of a bloody Maoist insurgency and a gradual royal putsch, the people's movement of April 2006 has laid the foundations for a new political beginning. Nepal's numerous problems must be understood against the background of historical and social developments of the modern state. The multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious and multilingual modern state of Nepal came into existence in the second half of the 18th century when the Shah monarchy of the principality of Gorkha unified numerous small states by military force. The Shah kings organized the new unitary state on the principles of traditional law with all its aspects of a stratified hierarchical social system. A small coterie of male members of so-called higher Hindu castes became dominant in all public spheres while other groups and the women became excluded, a situation that is still prevalent today and that is the reason for growing unrest. Neither the abolition of Rana oligarchy in 1950/1 nor the democratization of the country in 1990 changed this fundamentally. Elections for a constituent assembly took place in April 2008. They were meant as foundation for a reconstruction of state and society, but the political leaders still have a hard time with its implementation.

The current process of capitalist modernization in Latin American societies unveils a new cycle in the history of our countries. This process has touched every aspect of social life, being the working realm the field where the open-market economy has had a great effect. In this paper we expose the main labor reforms instrumented in the region: and we also analyze some theoretical and political views, from which we intend to justify the promulgation of a deregulating normative framework that substitutes past working laws. ; El actual proceso de modernización capitalista de las sociedades latinoamericanas abre un nuevo ciclo en la historia de nuestros países. Las repercusiones de este proyecto trastocan todos los espacios de la vida social. El mundo del trabajo es uno de los ámbitos que ha sufrido, de manera más directa, los efectos de la implantación del modelo de economía abierta. En este artículo se exponen las principales reformas laborales que se han instrumentado en la región y se analizan algunos de los argumentos teóricos y políticos a partir de los cuales se pretende justificar la promulgación de un marco normativo desregulador que sustituya a las anteriores leyes del trabajo.

Recent debates on informal economic activities have partially switched away from a pure monetary logic towards a more complex one, embedded in long term relations and reckoning with non materialistic paradigms. The role of informality in certain aspects of people's lives has however, remained largely unexplored. This article uncovers what happens when the state retires from (providing benefits and social services to) a geographic area and what kind of mechanisms, practices and institutions are created to make up for this. We suggest that, in the face of de facto abandonment by state welfare, and the absence of a private sector alternative, a myriad of transactions and actors can make up for this by replacing these forms of welfare informally. Our case study focuses on the nuclear landscapes around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in north–central Ukraine as we reveal the ways the excluded and abandoned, which we frame as post-nuclear "bare life" (Agamben, 1998), have created a mechanism of social security that is independent from the state and yet complements it. Informal, local and unofficial understandings of nuclear spaces are central to survival in this marginalised and risky environment.

The globe's first carbon projects were designed and implemented approximately 20 years ago following scientific insights that emissions of greenhouse gases needed to be mitigated. Visible in some of these early projects were the important aspects of social governance and local benefit sharing. The projects promised to be a panacea to environmental, social and economic problems in remote rural areas of developing countries. However, it took another decade before a wave of hundreds of carbon projects were launched. Many of the projects were offered under the mechanism of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, plus the role of conservation, sustainable forest management and carbon enhancement), as well as under a variety of voluntary schemes and national programs, public-private partnerships, and forestry-based investment initiatives. As decision-makers prepare the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climatic Change in Paris (COP21), Earthscan has released a book entitled `Carbon conflicts and forest landscapes in Africa', edited by Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones. According to the editors, the focus of the book is on what happens on the ground when carbon forestry projects arrive, what types of projects work, and, equally important, what doesn't work.

The experiences of stigmatization among people living with specific Serious Mental Illnesses (SMI), such as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) has not been addressed by the scientific literature. In this study we wanted to explore how people living with BPD experience stigmatization. We examine the experiences of 8 people (7 women and 1 man) living and receiving treatment for BPD in Puerto Rico. We used an exploratory qualitative design with semi-structured interviews. To interpret our data, we conducted a thematic analysis. We discuss three categories that focus on one identified theme: the interpersonal dimension of the stigmatization process. These categories are (a) society's views of people living with BPD, (b) family relationships, and (c) partner relationships. Our findings show that people with BPD experience a high attributed personal responsibility, discrimination, social exclusion, and lack of social support. In addition, our findings suggest that the stigmatization of BPD might be more complex than other mental illnesses as it shares characteristics of both SMI and less severe forms of mental illness. We also discuss the importance for practitioners to address stigmatization in therapy and the importance for research to address other aspects of the stigmatization process such as its structural dimension.

A basic premise in narrative therapy and inquiry is that life story telling is a mechanism by which experiences are rendered meaningful within some form of structure. However, narrative inquiry has to take cognisance of difficulties ensuing from discursive practices for different populations when eliciting their life stories. In this article I explicate a unique method, the Collage Life story Elicitation Technique (CLET), geared towards scaffolding life story remembering. Based on the theoretical underpinnings of social constructionism (Gergen, 2000), symbolic interactionism (Berg, 2009) and performative strategies in social science research the CLET provides a mode of expression and narrative performance for positioning the dialogical self. As the individual engages in collage-making and narrating, cognitive, motivational and affective aspects of autobiographical memories emerge while telling her or his life story. Different forms of positioning in the dialogical self and significant attachments to people, objects and life events co-exist in the verbal and non-verbal communications elicited with this technique. As suggested by the pilot study, the CLET provides a structure within which non-English speaking participants could explore multiple forms of positioning in the dialogical self without the restrictions of a verbal interview conversation.

We examined the usefulness of mindfulness practices for developing understandings of the intersection between the individual and social milieu. After incorporating mindfulness practices in a sociology course, we conducted open-ended surveys asking students' understanding of mindfulness practice and its usefulness to their learning. We asked students to describe their experience in a sentence of "Who, does what, to what or whom, when, where, how, and why." Students identified themselves (39.4 percent), class (40.9 percent), and the instructor (19.7 percent) as the leading actor ("who"), and each group showed varied understanding of mindfulness practices. This finding suggests that it is important to consider the instructor-led nature when incorporating mindfulness in courses. Second, our data show that nearly all students reported mindfulness practices as positive experiences to their learning. Students' enhanced self-awareness was a crucial part of their experience, which led them to developing appreciation about differences in perspectives and a sense of social connectedness. This finding suggests that mindfulness practices have great potential to help students develop sociological understanding of intersections between individuals and society. We argue mindfulness is worth further consideration as an educational tool to integrate the factual and mechanical aspects of learning and the deeper and holistic facets in sociology education.

The aim of the study was to explore experiences of a group of adolescent boys, living in single-mother households, regarding their satisfaction with various aspects of their family life. An interpretive/constructivist paradigm was adopted for describing and interpreting participants The study adopted interpretive/constructivist approach to investigate the subjective well-being of a group of adolescent boys in terms of their satisfaction with their family status, financial resources, social support and living environment of their single-mother family lives.Fifteen adolescent boys (aged 15 to 17 years)living in single-mother households were observed, interviewedindividually and on the collages they compiled and in groups. The study found the adolescent boys reported experiences to be characterized by negative emotionality and display of at-risk behaviour tendencies. The adolescent boys reported dissatisfaction with their family status, financial resources, social support and their family living environment to indicate their generally poor subjective well-beings. The study concludes that since financial insecurity of single-mother households is a major contributor to children's negative cognitive, emotional and behaviouraloutcomes, their optimaladjustment to life or well-being in single-mother households have to be provided for through public or government financed parental healthcare and support systems. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p2017