Modifying the Modifier: Body Modification as Social Incarnation

The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification, engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers endorse such practices as self‐constructive, distancing their practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii) critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference. However, in suspecting that such analysis should be attentive to the concurrent individual and social co‐constitution of behaviours, a sociological and post‐structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a “sovereign, denaturalizing” endeavour is demanded. An engagement with the originary violence of Derridian deconstruction will duly re‐conceive body modification practice as not something which introduces violence to corporeality. Rather, violence will present as a primordial differentiating process which bodies always already condition, and by which they are conditioned/produced/modified. The second issue at stake in this article will thus develop as a contestation to the characterization of “body modification” as an exclusive category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre‐existing, but rather manifest as the originary violence/differentiation of bodies‐as‐modifications‐which‐modify. This re‐defines modification from something that agentive subjects introduce to bodies, to something that subjects‐as‐bodies cannot help but be. Consequently, individual agency is not divorced from behaviour, but emerges as a corporeal, social production.     

THE EMPIRICAL DEFINITION OF MONEY: A CRITIQUE

Money talks, but it does not give itself away. Lately there has been much talk about money, and even less agreement than heretofore about what it is. Because of the growing immateriality of money, the difficulty of defining it has waxed rather than waned with increased knowledge. This, of course, has not made the development of monetary theory or the determination of monetary policy any easier. Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz (hereafter referred to as F-S) prefer an empirical definition of money to a priori definitions, such as the generally acceptable means of payment.1 However, they fail to demonstrate either that complete freedom from a priori conceptualization is possible or that such procedure can avoid circularity of reasoning.2 If there is no "right" definition of money (F-S, 1970, pp. 137, 145–146, 151, 197–198), there is no "empirical" definition in the absence of the "right" monetary theory.     

Differences between Poker Players and Non-Poker-Playing Gamblers

Since approximately 2003, the popularity of poker has quickly risen to unprecedented heights. This study examined poker play among university students who gamble on a regular basis. A total of 513 undergraduate students (females = 344, males = 170; mean age = 22.1) who gamble in some form at least two times per month completed an online questionnaire; 62.2 per cent (n = 319) of the respondents reported playing poker for money in the past year. A logistic regression analysis showed that poker players were more likely to be male, younger, have higher scores on an index of alcohol abuse, spend more time gambling and gamble more frequently compared to non-poker players. A second logistic regression showed that online/casino poker players were more likely to be male, have higher scores on an index of problem gambling, spend more time and money gambling, and gamble more often compared to social/non-poker players. These results are discussed in terms of the potential of poker's newfound popularity to lead to an increase in addictive behaviours, particularly among adolescents and young males.     

DIAGNOSING ORDER PLANNING PERFORMANCE AT A NAVY MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR ORGANIZATION,USING LOGISTIC REGRESSION

We present a tool to diagnose the behavior of planners in complex production processes and to establish improvement potential for the delivery performance by changing the planning behavior. Scientific literature on production control offers valuable knowledge, but the complexity of real‐life processes makes it impossible to directly apply this knowledge in real‐life. The presented tool identifies possible deficiencies in the current way of managing the business processes, by matching the scientific knowledge on order planning with data reflecting the real‐life processes via logistic regression. A case study at a maintenance organization illustrates the diagnosis tool.