Suchergebnisse

Cover; Half Title; Series Page; Title; Copyright; Contents; List of figures and tables; Preface; 1 Loneliness: is it a problem?; 2 Loneliness as a social problem; 3 Loneliness: a problem only for older people?; 4 Aloneness, loneliness, and solitude; 5 Lonely among others; 6 Loneliness across social groups; 7 Loneliness and class; 8 National disposition towards loneliness; 9 Tackling loneliness: messages to the lonely and the non-lonely; 10 Conclusions and reflections; Bibliography; Index

After the Communist Party came to power in 1949, capitalists disappeared from China's political and economic landscape. As the government launched economic reforms, however, a new generation of capitalists emerged as an economic and social group of considerable influence. Keming Yang examines some crucial aspects of this group's political life: their self image, and their political image; associations; treatment of their employees; relationships with government officials. Exploring the implications of China's political development, Yang considers the notion of 'elite corporatism', and why democracy remains so distant in China's political system. Since 1949, Chinese capitalists have experienced some dramatic shifts in their political and economic life. Keming Yang examines what such changes tell us about China's current political situation and future political development, making use of both historical and current interdisciplinary evidence.

This is a critical introduction to the use of statistical methods in social research. It provides a unique approach to statistics that concentrates on helping social researchers think about the conceptual basis for the statistical methods they are using. Whereas other statistical methods books instruct students in how to get through the statistics-based elements of their chosen course with as little mathematical knowledge as possible, this book aims to improve students' statistical literacy, with the ultimate goal of turning them into competent researchers.

The emergence of China as a major world economy is of great importance to the global political economy and to international business. There has been much research on the macro level of institutional reform but little detailed work on the grassroots level of entrepreneurship in China. This innovative book addresses this gap by investigating how an economic system dominated by central plans, communist ideologies and suppressing bureaucracies could generate such energy from the bottom of society, fuelling the country's economic growth. Keming Yang's theory of entrepreneurship is based on two interrelated concepts: double entrepreneurship and institutional holes. He argues that the two concepts bridge a gap between the neo-classical institutionalism of economic development and entrepreneurship studies that emphasize individual choice. The rigorous theoretical framework is supported by substantial empirical research, offering statistical analyses of survey data as well as detailed case studies. This timely book will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership in sociology, economics, business studies and Chinese and Asian Studies.

AbstractDespite the introduction of market mechanisms and the rapid growth of the private sector, in some ways important to the entrepreneurial process, private entrepreneurs in China remain dependent on the Chinese state.

"With its popularity has come an unresolved issue about social capital: is it an individual or a collective property, or both? Many researchers take it for granted that social capital is collective, but most social surveys implicitly measure social capital at the individual level. After reviewing the definitions by Bourdieu, Coleman, and Putnam, the author becomes to agree with Portes that social capital can be an individual asset and should be firstly analyzed as such; if social capital is to be analyzed as a collective property, then the analysis should explicitly draw on a clear definition of individual social capital. The author thus defines individual social capital as the features of social groups or networks that each individual member can access and use for obtaining further benefits. Four types of features are identified (basic, specific, generalized, and structural), and example formulations of survey questions are proposed. Following this approach, he then assesses some survey questions organized under five themes commonly found in social surveys for measuring social capital: participation in organizations, social networks, trust, civic participation, and perceptions of local area. The author concludes that most of these themes and questions only weakly or indirectly measure individual social capital; therefore, they should be strengthened with the conceptual framework proposed in this paper and complemented with the items used in independent surveys on social networks." (author's abstract)

In spite of the establishment of probability sampling methods since the 1930s, non-probability sampling methods have remained popular among many commercial and polling agents, and they have also survived the embarrassment from a few incorrect predictions in American presidential elections. The increase of costs and the decline of response rates for administering probability samples have led some survey researchers to search for a non-probability sampling method as an alternative to probability sampling. In this study we aim to test whether results from a quota sample, believed to be the non-probability sampling method that is the closest in representativeness to probability sampling, are statistically equivalent to those from a probability sample. Further, we pay special attention to the effects of the following two factors for understanding the difference between the two sampling methods: the survey's topic and the response rate. An experimental survey on social capital was conducted in a student society in Northeast England. The results suggest that the survey topic influences who responded and that the response rate was associated with the sample means as well. For these reasons, we do not think quota sampling should be taken as an acceptable alternative to probability sampling.