Suchergebnisse

Disposed to Learn explores the relationship between ethnicity and dispositions towards learning, with a focus on primary school students of Chinese, Pasifika and Anglo Australian backgrounds. The authors challenge the tendency towards the essentializing of ethnicity within multiculturalism to argue for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between culture and academic performance. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, they examine how home and school practices produce particular attributes that are embodied as dispositions towards learning - the scholarly habitus. These home and school p

Moral motives are important for pro-environmental behavior. But such behavior is not only motivated by moral or environmental concerns. We examined what higher order motives, other than morality, may be important for understanding pro-environmental behavior, by studying consumer identities. In three studies ( N = 877) four consumer identities were distinguished: moral, wasteful, frugal, and thrifty. Frugal and moral consumer identities were most salient and were the strongest predictors of pro-environmental behaviors, but in different ways. Frugality, which is related to, but distinct from thriftiness, was particularly important for behaviors associated with waste reduction of any kind (including money). The findings suggest that people adopt the same behavior for different reasons, in ways consistent with their consumer identities. People manage multiple consumer identities simultaneously, and environmental policy is likely to be more effective if it addresses these multiple identities.

This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/Ravaisson–Bergson–Deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue.