‘Freedom From’ and ‘Freedom To’ Across Countries

It has been over 70 years since Erich Fromm wrote “Escape From Freedom.” He defined two types of freedom: freedom from (negative) and freedom to (positive). Fromm’s masterpiece, however, does not measure the two types of freedom, and this is not surprising—there were no freedom data at the time. Now, there are plenty of data, and Fromm’s concepts of freedom can be operationalized across countries. The two types of freedom, positive and negative, correlate at below 0.5, and such low correlation is surprising—I discuss outliers and point out that freedom is an end in itself, as recognized, for instance, by Amartya Sen. Furthermore, while we acknowledge the importance of freedom from, we forget that freedom from is not fully realized without freedom to: it’s great to be free; but it’s even better to feel free as well.     

The ‘What’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Employee Well-Being: A New Model

This paper examines the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of employee well-being. Beginning with the ‘what’ of well-being, the construct of mental health was explored with the aim of building a model of employee well-being. It was proposed that employee well-being consists of three core components: (1) subjective well-being; (2) workplace well-being and (3) psychological well-being. Following this, the ‘why’ of employee well-being was investigated; that is, why employee well-being should be an important matter for organisations. It was argued that employee well-being is an important precursor to organisational well-being, as indicated by its links to employee turnover and performance. The next section was concerned with the ‘how’ of employee well-being; that is, how well-being can be reliably enhanced. Drawing on two models of strengths and a practice model of psychological assessment, it was asserted that strength-based development can reliably enhance employee well-being. A solid framework for understanding and measuring employee well-being is offered in the hope that it will foster a more integrated approach to assessing and optimising employee well-being.

On ‘Consistent’ Poverty

The measurement of poverty as ‘consistent’ poverty offers a solution to one of the primary problems of poverty measurement within Social Policy of the last three decades. Often treated as if they were synonymous, ‘indirect’ measures of poverty, such as low income measures, and ‘direct’ measures, such as indices of material deprivation, identify surprisingly different people as being poor. In response to this mismatch, a team of Irish researchers put forward a measure which identified respondents in as being in poverty when they experienced both a low standard of living, as measured by deprivation indicators, and a lack of resources, as measured by a low income line. Importantly, they argued that the two measures required an equal weight. In this paper, I present a reconsideration of the consistent poverty measure from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. In particular, I examine the claim that low income and material deprivation measures should be given an ‘equal weight’. I argue that, from a conceptual perspective, the nature of the indicators at hand means that a deprivation-led measurement approach might be understood to align with the definition of poverty which Nolan and Whelan outline and, from an empirical perspective, that it is the material deprivation measure—and not the low income measure—which is particularly effective in identifying individuals at risk of multiple forms of deprivation. However, I argue that greater attention needs to be given to the question of whether indicators of material deprivation provide a sufficient measure of material poverty and suggest that advancing the measurement of material deprivation beyond its relatively rudimentary state represents an important priority for poverty research.     

‘十二亿人口日’的警示——纪念‘9.25’公开信发表15周年

今春二月,春寒料峭。侧耳倾听,在滚滚的春雷声中,和响着我国人口发展的隆隆脚步声。2月15日清晨6时14分,随着一个新的小生命呱呱坠地,标志着我国人口迈进了12亿的大门。这是由国家统计局向世人宣布的令世界瞩目的信息。中国政府决定,2月15日定为“中国的12亿人口日”。     

‘三结合’领导工作刍议

在计划生育工作中,一些地方创造出了“三结合”的经验,为我们继续做好这项工作,指明了一条必由之路。搞不搞“三结合”、能否搞好“三结合”,关键在各级领导。从领导工作的角度来思考,至少应做到以下几点:     

“蓝印”户口给城市计划生育工作带来的困扰及对策

编辑同志: 随着我国改革开放的不断深入和商品经济的迅速发展,给城市计划生育工作带来了很多新情况、新问题,其中“蓝印”户口的出现又给本来难以承受的城市计划生育工作增加了新的困扰。 所谓“蓝印”户口,是指在城区有效的城镇居民户口。它与现在城区居民户口的主要区别是不能随意迁往其他城镇。办理“蓝印”户口的对象是居住在本市各县区的农业人口和愿意来本区居住的全国各省、市、县的农业人口。     

Tribal membership requirements and the demography of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Native Americans

This paper examines the twentieth-century population recovery of Native Americans with reference to urbanization, intermarriage, and differing definitions of the Native American population from census and tribal enrollment data. The recent increase in the Native American population reflected in regular US decennial censuses since 1960 is discussed in terms of changing self-identification of individuals as Native American. Also discussed are criteria for enrollment in Native American tribes, particularly blood quantum requirements. Census enumerations are compared with tribal enrollment data, and it is illustrated that a large proportion of those identifying as Native American in the census are not enrolled in Native American tribes. Special attention is given to how Native American tribal enrollment criteria might impact future population size.     

Comparing Social Behaviour Across Culture and Nations: The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ Questions

How is the cultural construct of individualism-collectivism relate to self-esteem? This is a complex and challenging proposition. Self-esteem (i.e., a person’s global, evaluative view of his/her self), has resisted unequivocal definition or clear operationalization. There is a substantial literature on self-esteem hypothesis which may be stated thus: self-concept and self-esteem play important roles in a person’s decisions to engage in certain behaviour. Due to inconsistent and indeterminate findings, business researchers and cross-cultural scholars, have failed to take into account possible interaction between culture/gender and social behaviour (self). Through analyses of variance, we provide evidence, that nationality yielded a highly significant levels of self-esteem with a distinctive statistically significant main and interaction effects. This result is robust to different benchmarks (for example, Hofstede’s cultural indicators) used to measure self-esteem. The results are consistent with previous research, the cross-cultural stability of the measure makes it a potentially useful tool for evaluating the nature of self-conception across cultures. Caveats and implications are discussed.     

Toward a comprehensive ‘quality-of-life’ index

Any attempt to construct an overall measure of the quality-of-life (“QOL”) of a community, population group, or larger society must inevitably confront the critical obstacle posed by the absence of a common numéraire. The diverse elements that significantly affect the “QOL” of individuals and social groups are each subject, at least in principle, to some form of measurement, but no satisfactory method has yet been devised whereby these different measurements could be reduced to a single metric.The construct that is developed in this paper cannot claim to have overcome this fundamental problem; nor does it settle the equally basic difficulties relating to what specific indicators to include in the composite construct, and how to weigh their individual values. However, it illustrates one possible approach toward the development of a summary index value that provides some insight into both direction (“favorable” or “unfavorable”) and magnitude of observed year-to-year changes in a selected number of fairly representative socioeconomic indicators for which measures were available for the United States annually from 1969 to the present. The information provided by this index lacks explanatory power, but examination of the components of the observed changes in the index does yield some useful insight into the relative contribution of changes in different “areas of concern” to the overall changes observed in the “QOL” in the United States during the 1969–1985 period.     

Negotiating the ground: ‘mobilizing’ a divided field site in the ‘post-conflict’ city

ABSTRACT

While an exploration of mobility patterns in ‘post-conflict’ societies has much to tell us about how division is produced through ordinary activities, less work has considered the practical application of a mobilities ‘lens’ during fieldwork in such contexts. Negotiating the ground in highly polarized contexts presents a unique array of challenges, but also offers opportunities to make use of mobile methodologies. This paper discusses the advantages of GPS-based technologies and walking interviews to a recent activity-space segregation study in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and reflects on methodological issues posed by the ‘post-conflict’ field site.     

India’s ‘Missing Women’ and Men’s Sexual Risk Behavior

Although scholars and policymakers have long been concerned with the ??missing women?? of India, little rigorous research has examined the consequences of India??s sex ratio imbalance for young men??s sexual risk behavior and reproductive health. We use data from the third wave of India??s 2005?C2006 National Family and Health Survey to examine the influence of the community female-to-male sex ratio at ages 10?C39 on men??s likelihood of marrying early in life, of engaging in premarital, multi-partnered, and commercial sex, and of contracting a sexually-transmitted disease. We estimate logistic regression models that control for respondents?? demographic and socioeconomic status and that adjust for the clustering of observations within communities. Net of the effects of other characteristics, the female-to-male sex ratio is positively and significantly associated with the likelihood that men marry prior to age 18 and inversely and significantly associated with the odds that men have had intercourse with a commercial sex worker. However, no significant net associations are observed between the sex ratio and the other outcomes. Education, wealth, religious affiliation, caste, and geographic region emerge as significant predictors of Indian men??s sexual risk behaviors.     

Mobility and sociality in proximity-sensitive digital urban ecologies: ‘Timid encounters’ and ‘seam-sensitive walks’

This paper is a case study of the use of a proximity-sensitive game played on mobile gaming terminals, in Japan and in France, Dragon Quest 9, and of distinctive forms of mobility and urban encounters which emerge around it. We show how players, when assembled together, walk the ‘connected walk,’ that is they adopt a particular gait, slower than the usual walking pace, with repeated pauses which appears as a tentative and exploratory kind of mobility oriented towards the random occurrence of proximity-based screen-mediated events, and therefore both adjusted to and constitutive of the proximity-sensitive hybrid ecology as a serendipitous place, to be experienced as such. With respect to urban encounters, we have identified a characteristic tension, relevant to locative media in general, in which concerns with potential identification and recognition ‘in the game’ contrasts with the interaction order of urban traffic encounters, characterized by ‘civil inattention.’ This gives rise to the phenomenon of ‘timid encounters,’ in which players strive to experience game encounters with other players a few meters away, while trying to elude visual or verbal recognition.     

Women’s mobility and ‘transport-related social exclusion’ in Bishkek

This paper analyses gendered mobilities in Bishkek in the space of the most popular form of public transport: the minibus, or ‘marshrutka’. As the means by which women often access various important sites of daily life, the marshrutka itself is a site of negotiation and interaction. Utilizing theories of mobility and empirical data, we argue that marshrutkas are spaces that can give rise to two dichotomous conditions: positive marshrutka experiences may increase the social mobility of female passengers and subsequently increase social empowerment and influence, while negative ones can provide the grounds for social exclusion and gender inequality.     

The ‘Bills of Mortality’ of Florence

In a number of North Italian Cities a series of Bills of Mortality is available, beginning in the late Middle Ages and continued without significant interruptions until the nineteenth century. On the basis of fresh archival material, the author re-assesses the reliability of the Bills of Mortality of Florence and concludes that during the sixteenth centuries deaths of children were recorded only exceptionally.