Evolution of Equity Market Risk During the Crisis: Europe, Americas and Asia

A set of regional and country??s equity indices have been evaluated and analysed in their Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) in this paper, using computational methods based on the Johnson systems. Comparing the main statistics and the values of the two cited measures of financial risk obtained using a roll-over mechanism in the period January 2008?CJuly 2012, the impact of the crisis on equity market risk can be shown. It seems that for all regions and countries the patterns are very similar: there is a peak of all the risk measures adopted at the beginning of the crisis (September 2008?CFebruary 2009) and another turbulent period in 2011 (from July to December). In other terms, the global patterns of the main financially relevant countries and their regional aggregations demonstrate that ??One Financial system??, and just one, is already at work, in theory and in practice. On the other hand, the scale of the risk measures differs from one country to another: e.g., with a probability of 1?%, the potential daily loss on an equity position in Latin America in the worst period arrives to about 25?%, the Emerging Markets as a whole show values around 20?% and Asia arrives to 15?%, while the US and European corresponding values are below 14?%. This is true whatever the risk measure and whatever the confidence interval (which, again, influences strongly the scale of the risk values). Looking in detail to the last period (April 2012?CJuly 2012), a general improvement could be appreciated: the risk measures are all around 4?% if not on one hand Italy and Spain (around 6?%), Greece (around 10?%) and on the other hand the ??virtuous?? Chile (around 1.5?%), again with reference to a probability of 1?%. Nevertheless, indices of performance (expected return over risk measure) have been evaluated and compared. They give sometimes different answers to the risk measures themselves.     

Finance Capital and the Water Crisis: Insights from Mexico

This paper explores how finance capitalism materializes as socio-ecological process, shedding light on the complex causalities in which current shifts in control over natural resources are embedded. Housing is a critical aspect of financialization. A case study of the financialized housing sector in Central Mexico shows (i) how housing policy serves as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth from the working class to global finance capital, and (ii) how mortgage-financed housing projects come into being only through an existing water governance regime, while in turn leading to new structures of groundwater governance with profound social and ecological implications. The paper concludes that current accumulation and natural resource regimes interact in complex and contradictory ways that go beyond straightforward resource grabbing. It suggests that Moore’s concept of ‘capitalism in the web of life’ could help to understand how finance capitalism simultaneously transforms the socio-natural world and is produced by it.     

Kairos economies in the post-Soviet transition period of Central Asia

There are times when entire populations of certain countries have had to readjust their lives and economic strategies as all of society is under transition. Post-Soviet Central Asia underwent this period after 1991. During times of transition, there are always people that tend to be able to make use of the new uncertainties, even at the risk of entering legal grey areas. Here new social groups emerge, ethnic origin becomes relevant and new kinship ties are made. These transformation periods are often short and provide limited opportunities for analysing the strategies of those pioneers that I call Kairos economists. They often act only in cooperation with residents of the border and with duty customs and security personnel. This article analyses this special economy with the help of case studies that have been observed during the transformation period from the Soviet to an independent Central Asia.     

Credit and Credibility: Homeownership and Identity Management in the Midst of the Foreclosure Crisis

This article explores how homeowners threatened with foreclosure attribute responsibility for their troubles and manage the stigma of mortgage default. In light of widespread home loss, at‐risk owners develop an understanding of the crisis as a collective experience and yet still experience stigma and employ identity management techniques to construct themselves as responsible homeowners. Based on interviews and fieldwork, this article explores the tension between collective and individual responsibility and the implications of this attribution for identity.     

Navigating a Hostile Terrain: Refugees and Human Rights in Southeast Asia

Countries in Southeast Asia serve as origins, transit routes, and destinations for an increasing number of refugees, asylum seekers, and other people displaced by conflict and persecution. In this article, I consider existing academic literature on refugees and forced migration and situate current trends and processes related to refugees in Southeast Asia within such work. I begin by surveying sociology material on refugees and forced migration processes in general, also drawing from related fields of human geography and interdisciplinary refugee studies. I then review current mixed migration trends and corresponding state responses in the context of globalization and contemporary conflict in Southeast Asia, placing refugee movements within this setting. Finally, using examples from the region, I consider two rough areas of inquiry in need of further sociological exploration – (i) purposive transnational refugee actions and processes and (ii) the dynamic social spaces created and developed out of refugee migration. Human rights implications of these issues are considered throughout, and suggestions to reconsider human rights protection beyond nation‐state‐focused models are given.     

Revisiting the Effectiveness of Base Crisis Response Strategies in Comparison of Reputation Management Crisis Responses

This experimental study found that employing reputation management crisis-response strategies was no better than adopting only the base crisis-response strategy (i.e., instructing and adjusting information) in terms of generating positive responses from the public. Two-sided messages (i.e., sharing both positive and negative information) in crisis communication were found to be more effective than one-sided messages in a victim crisis. In addition, even in a preventable crisis, one-sided messages (i.e., sharing only positive information) were not more effective than two-sided messages. Finally, the study found little support for Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT)'s recommendations for the best crisis response strategy selections.     

Interorganizational Groups in Human Services: Environmental and Interpersonal Relationships

Despite the frequent use of interorganizational groups in human services, their performance tends to be uneven. A dual focus on both environmental and interpersonal dimensions is required to understand variations in the development and outcomes of these groups. The author proposes a conceputal framework, grounded in open systems theory, exchange theory, and small group theory, to integrate both external and internal perspectives. Four types of interorganizational groups are identified based on their origin (mandated vs. voluntary) and the source of task structure (externally directed vs. internally developed). The four group types are illustrated with scenarios that highlight potential benefits and concerns. Characteristics of each group type are discussed. Further, administrative and policy guidelines are suggested for improving the performance of each type of group.     

Resource-Based Crisis Management: The Important Role of the CEO's Reputation

This study provides empirical support for the positive power of a CEO's reputation as a strategic resource during and after a corporate crisis. Specifically, it demonstrates that a CEO's favorable reputation relieves many stakeholders' negative perceptions in a postcrisis situation. In addition, this study tests whether a particular type of CEO reputation will be more effective than another in dealing with different types of threats that a crisis poses to corporate reputation. This study introduces a resource-based approach to crisis that provides a wide, comprehensive set of strategies based on a variety of an organization's competitive resources.     

Crisis Management by Subjectivation: Toward a Feminist Neo-Gramscian Framework for the Analysis of Europe's Multiple Crisis

The ongoing global crisis not only poses challenges for critical empirical analyses, it also forces us to reconsider central analytical concepts. This paper takes the multiple crisis as a starting point to reconsider notions of (state) power, hegemony, and subjectivation in contemporary crisis management. We discuss recent analyses by feminist and neo-Gramscian scholars, highlight their valuable contributions to a richer understanding of current crisis politics, and argue for their mutual complementarity. Neo-Gramscian perspectives, which productively highlight the current conjuncture's increasing (lack of) hegemonic qualities, need to be confronted with feminist insights regarding the current transformations of gender orders. In combining these approaches, we develop the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’. To illustrate this we refer to the example of Greece: increasingly coercive and authoritarian modes of governance parallel the re-privatization of reproductive work and increasing reliance on gendered division of labor, traditional concepts of privacy, and gendered knowledge of care and the practices associated with it for the reproduction of social cohesion. With the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’ we hence refer to the fact that austerity policies draw on a gendered (re-)allocation and subjective incorporation of social responsibilities as hidden resources of stability and hegemony. The crisis, through its management, is displaced into the gendered subjects themselves.     

Making Human Behavior Theory Real Through the Unreal: Fiction in the HBSE Classroom

This article examines the use of fictional literature as a method for helping students apply human behavior theory in competent practice. When students and educators read a poem, short essay, or novel, it allows them the opportunity to join together as an audience as they tease out teachable lessons from the story. The authors posit that when used in human behavior and the social environment courses, fictional literature allows educators and students to experience abstract content as more concrete. Following a brief literature review, we examine one novel through the lens of three different human behavior theories.     

Furloughs and Faculty Management of Time: Maintaining Quality in an Economic Crisis

An anonymous Web-based survey was used to gather the perceptions and experiences from 114 faculty members teaching in 16 social work programs in the California State University system about the effect of severe budget cuts on their educational activities. Most respondents reported they worked on their furlough days and maintained the same or larger workload that they had before the furlough. Larger workloads, diminished feelings of personal accomplishment, and stressful interactions with students were associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Everyday Violence in Central America as Seen Through the Life of One Woman

Everyday violence in Central America assumes diverse forms, with the structural violence intrinsic to the poverty and inequality in the region being the most predominant. The life story of Andrea embodies many elements of that violence, as it led to her entering the labor force as a child, to her having her own children early, and to her employment in the service sector. But, Andrea came of age during a revolution in her country—that waged by the Sandinistas in the 1980s—which provided her family with resources of both a material and non-material nature. The changes it wrought, however, were not deep enough to transform the opportunities of the next generation and were undercut in its aftermath. Hence, Andrea’s aspiration for her children to have different lives from her own required her emigration to achieve it. Yet, it was also the revolution, in the form of a network that emerged from it, that made possible her work abroad in Italy. She was able to earn enough there to provide the education for her children that she sought. Drawing on an oral history I collected from Andrea, this article portrays the challenges she confronted, the ways she addressed them, and how her life course has been produced by the interaction between these phenomena. In addition to telling her story and describing the ways in which structural violence colored it, the article highlights the broader social, economic, and political dynamics that make this about more than just one woman.     

Super Intentions: Golf Course Management and the Evolution of Environmental Responsibility

This article examines the golf industry's evolving responses to environment‐related problems since the mid‐1960s. Drawing from an analysis of golf superintendent trade publications, the article shows how golf industry members initially denied that their work could have negative impacts, but eventually acknowledged potential golf‐related environmental problems—and ultimately positioned themselves as environmental leaders through various forms of professionalization. The analysis also reveals contradictions in superintendents' messaging about their environmental expertise and about the safety of turfgrass chemicals. The article concludes with reflections on why these contradictions should inspire concerns about golf's nascent environmental leadership, and on corporate environmentalism generally.     

Xinjiang and China's Relations with Central Asia, 1991-2001: Across the 'Domestic-Foreign Frontier'?

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is China's largest administrative unit and is populated by predominantly non-Han Chinese peoples. Throughout the 1991-2001 period, Xinjiang has witnessed regular and sometimes violent incidents of Uighur opposition to Chinese control of the region. The re-emergence of ethnic nationalist sentiment in Xinjiang has serious implications not only for China's internal economic and political development but also for its foreign relations with the states of Central Asia. This paper will argue that this process does not follow an internal-external trajectory exclusively, in that both its foreign policy objectives and the international environment in which those objectives are pursued can also influence China's policies in Xinjiang. Conversely, reformulation of Chinese foreign policy objectives toward certain states can also have an impact upon the formulation and implementation of minority policy within Xinjiang. An example of these processes is China's relations with the post-Soviet Central Asian Republics. This paper argues that China's relations with these states over the 1991-2001 period have been influenced by both fragmenting and integrating dynamics, whereby renewed ethno-religious conflicts have developed in parallel with increasing economic and political integration across Central Asia and Xinjiang.     

Environmental thought and ecopoetics in the cultures of post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe

This article discusses the rise of an environmental awareness of place in post-socialist cultures as a reaction to decades-long authoritarian practices that had shaped and informed human beings’ relation with natural space. Drawing on examples of fiction and non-fiction from Poland and Ukraine (Andrzej Stasiuk, Iurii Andrukhovych, Olga Tokarczuk, and Halyna Pohutiak), this article focuses on the ecocritical and environmentally transformative potential of several representative geographically conscious narratives. To examine such emergent readings of place, the article discusses the development of the narrative paradigms of (bio)regionalism and localism, which, on the one hand, represent alternative ways of conceptualizing the natural environment and, on the other, serve as reactions to earlier socialist constructions of centralist geographies and homogeneous national spaces.