DO SOCIAL PREFERENCES INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY? FIELD EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM FISHERMEN IN TOYAMA BAY

In addition to showing that student measures of social preference, a concern for outcomes achieved by other reference agents, are quite different from those obtained in the field with participants who face social dilemmas in their daily lives, we find links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the field stock of social preferences evolves endogenously with respect to how widely team production is utilized. Because the link between productivity and social preference is strong, we provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take notice of social preferences. (JEL C93, D21, D24, H41, J24, M52, Z13)     

Shared Learning for Doctors and Social Workers: Evaluation of a Programme

Correspondence to John Carpenter, Tizard Centre, Institute of Social and Applied Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7LZ Summary This paper reports a shared learning programme for final yearsocial work and medical students which was designed in the lightof social psychological studies of intergroup behaviour (theContact Hypothesis). Key features included institutional supportfor the programme and opportunities to work as equals in pairsand small groups on shared tasks in a cooperative atmosphere.Topics included alcohol abuse, dealing with psychiatric emergencies,deliberate self-harm and community senices for people with learningdisabilities. A comprehensive evaluation of the effects of the programme onone cohort of 85 participants revealed that overall attitudestowards the other profession had improved and that each sawthe other as more professionally competent at the end of theprogramme. Participants reported increased knowledge of theattitudes, skills, roles and duties of the other professionand of how to work together more effectively.     

Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space: the case of women,peace and security

To what extent do online issue networks serve as a proxy for their real‐space counterparts in structure and substance? This question is significant because a number of scholars have begun to study transnational advocacy networks through their representations online. We explored whether this assumption is valid by comparing the network composition and agenda composition of the advocacy network around ‘women, peace and security’, as operationalized through a web‐based survey of actual activists, and the network's online representations of itself, as measured through advocacy websites. Two specific concerns drove the study. First, how closely does the structure of issue networks, as represented on the World Wide Web, correspond with actual advocates' understanding of the players within a specific issue domain? Second, to what extent does the online issue agenda correlate with the most prominent issues described by real‐space advocates within a transnational network? Our findings yielded a high correlation between the online issue agenda and activists’ interpretations of the agenda. However, we found that while hyperlink analysis is an effective tool for identifying the ‘hubs’ or ‘gatekeepers’ within a specific issue network, the nature of the World Wide Web makes it is a blunt tool with which to capture the broader network. This suggests that while the web poses important opportunities as a data source, scholars of transnational networks must pay closer attention to the methodological assumptions implicit in their reliance on this and other new media.