Response Effects in the Electronic Survey

This report examines the electronic survey as a research tool.In an electronic survey, respondents use a text processing programto self-administer a computer-based questionnaire. As more peoplehave access to computers, electronic surveys may become widespread.The electronic survey can reduce processing costs because itautomates the transformation of raw data into computer-readableform. It can combine advantages of interviews (e.g., prompts,complex branching) with those of paper mail surveys (e.g., standardization,anonymity). An important issue is how the electronic surveyaffects the responses of people who use it. We conducted anexperimental sample survey on health attitudes, behaviors, andpersonal traits using two forms of administration: electronicand paper mail. Closed-end responses in the electronic surveywere less socially desirable and tended to be more extreme thanwere responses in the paper survey. Open-ended responses thatcould be edited by respondents were relatively long and disclosing.These findings are consistent with other research on computer-mediatedcommunication, raising general issues about using computersto collect self-report data.     

MEASURING THE WELFARE GAIN FROM PERSONAL COMPUTERS

The welfare gain to consumers from the introduction of personal computers (PCs) is estimated. A simple model of consumer demand is formulated that uses a slightly modified version of standard preferences. The modification permits marginal utility, and hence total utility, to be finite when the consumption of computers is zero. This implies that the good will not be consumed at a high enough price. It also bounds the consumer surplus derived from the product. The model is calibrated/estimated using standard national income and product account data. The welfare gain from the introduction of PCs is 2%–3% of consumption expenditure. (JEL E01, E21, O33, O47)     

"SECRET BALLOTS" AND SELF-REPORTS IN AN EXIT-POLL EXPERIMENT

A controlled exit-poll experiment on Election Day (November3, 1992) shows that refusals to answer questions and other evasiveforms of responding were significantly lower when respondentswere given a self-administered "secret-ballot" questionnairethan when they were interviewed face-to-face. While there weresome suggestive interactions of this mode-of-data collectioneffect with age and sex, and with the partisan atmosphere ofthe precinct in which the interviews were conducted, they wereborderline in significance, inconsistent in pattern, or difficuitto interpret. More important, comparisons with official electionreturns (the truth) indicated that the secret-ballot techniquewas more accurate than were face-to-face interviews in estimatingthe final outcome on the most socially sensitive of three self-reportedvotes: a vote for or against a tax levy for elderly services.Using a genuine secret ballot in the tradition of the olderGallup preelection polls can thus increase the validity of self-reportsin exit polls today.     

Can stigma become a resource? The mobilisation of aesthetic–corporal capital by female immigrant entrepreneurs from Brazil

The proportion and visibility of Brazilian women and particularly the specific images of Brazil and Brazilians in the Portuguese imaginary have contributed to the construction of new versions of stigma and stereotypes surrounding them. Mainstream images of Brazilian women have incorporated prejudices about the sensuality of Creole women who are reminiscent of the Portuguese colonial imaginary. Starting from this stigmatised image, we show how Brazilian women entrepreneurs in the ‘beauty’ business filière reinterpret and mobilise this perceived negative image, transforming it into an added value associated with an ‘aesthetic’ Brazilian body culture. This idea of ‘body’ aesthetics becomes a business resource transformed into aesthetic–corporal capital, a key component of the Brazilian beauty business filière. Empirically, this research is based on qualitative elements, in particular 25 interviews with Brazilian women entrepreneurs of the beauty filière working in Portugal, collected for the project BELTS-W (Brazilian Entrepreneurial Links and Transnational Strategies – Women).     

‘Give me my pathway!‘: multinational migration,transnational skills regimes and migrant subjectification

In this article, I address the interplay between migration regimes and migrant subjectivities in stepwise multinational migration through a comparative analysis of biographical interviews with migrants in the healthcare and dairy farm work sectors in New Zealand. In both sectors, migrants' trajectories involve movements from Asia to locations in the Middle East, North Africa or Japan before arrival in New Zealand, and in some cases plans for onward migration. The analysis of these migration patterns and the narratives of migrants, reveal an emergent transnational skills regime that involves connected but uncoordinated systems of skills recognition; negotiating this regime occurs through increased attunement to migration on the part of multinational migrants, as well as adaptation to the expectations of authorities and employers. I conclude the article by suggesting that while multinational migration involves new opportunities for people on the move it also entails greater entanglement in the unequal conditioning of transnational migration.     

‘Writing’ aesth‐ethics on the child's body: Developing maternal subjectivities through clothing our children

What could we learn from the ‘aesth‐ethic’ practices of clothing children? The dual focus of this article is to analyse the everyday clothing of children as well as the development of maternal subjectivities as relevant to discussions of aesthetic labour in the field of organization studies. Drawing upon the literatures on aesthetic labour and maternal subjectivities in the field of organization studies, we develop a fine‐grained understanding of the relatively intense and effortful maternal labours that clothing our children encapsulates. Methodologically, we use autoethnographic diary notes combined with feminist ‘memory work’ to analyse clothing as an affectual form of storytelling or ‘writing’ on the child's body that (re)produces certain sociocultural understandings about mothering, sustainability and childhood(s) in a Nordic context embraced by western consumerism. By considering the limitations of the approach taken to drawing wider conclusions about motherhoods, identity construction and clothing, this article advances our understanding of the development of particular middle‐class maternal subjectivities seeking to problematize mass consumerism through childrenswear, and how idea(l)s concerning gender and childhood(s) are being (re)produced in and through clothing.     

TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF AND THE AESTHETIC PROJECT OF ALTERNATIVE HEALTH

Utilizing ethnographic materials and data from thirty-eight interviews, this article investigates the relevance of alternative health bodily regimes as a source of involvement in public life. These regimes, we argue, have an aesthetic core, a quest for perfect harmony and balance, that step by step makes people available for participation in public life. The article seeks to overcome the neglect of aesthetic sources of participation in public life as well as the neglect of the body as a symbol of risk and a source of resistance to dominant institutional arrangements. Foucault's later writings on "technologies of the self"are used to interpret alternative health regimes and open up their politicizing potential.     

Orientierungsprozesse im Vertrauensdilemma. Beziehungskonstruktionen in Beratungen zur privaten Altersvorsorge

Financial advice given by consultants is crucial for retirement saving decisions. We argue that those willing to save are facing a dilemma since there is a widespread mistrust towards the financial industry while financial advice is indispensable for coping with complexity in the decision process. Exploring the case of the state-subsidized Riester-pension in Germany, we show that savers construct personal relationships with the advisor to deal with this complex dilemma in terms of theories on trust. Using a mixed-method design embracing both quantitative techniques—cross-sectional as well as longitudinal (fixed-effects) approaches—and qualitative evidence, we shed new light on old age saving decisions. In detail, the exploitation of longitudinal surveys (of GSOEP and the German SAVE Panel 2004–2010) and of 18 problem-centred interviews provides the following findings: (1) Retirement saving decisions often rely on pre-existing relationships to financial advisors. (2) The less alternative resources available, the more savers rely on these relationships. (3) Financial advisors use their existing relationships to sell pensions. (4) The qualitative material unveils different patterns concerning the decision-making process which are trusteeship, strategic alliance, and acceptable ad-hoc collaboration. Altogether, the widespread idea of private retirement saving resulting from an atomistic and rational planning of the future is an illusion.     

Notes towards a ‘social aesthetic’: Guest editors' introduction to the special section

There is an emerging ‘aesthetic turn’ within sociology which currently lacks clear focus. This paper reviews the different issues feeding into this interest and contributes to its development. Previous renderings of this relationship have set the aesthetic up against sociology, as an emphasis which ‘troubles’ conventional understandings of sociality and offers no ready way of reconciling the aesthetic with the social. Reflecting on the contributions of recent social theorists, from figures including Bourdieu, Born, Rancière, Deleuze, and Martin, we argue instead for the value of a social aesthetic which critiques instrumentalist and reductive understandings of the social itself. In explicating what form this might take, the latter parts of the paper take issue with classical modernist conceptions of the aesthetic which continue to dominate popular and sociological understandings of the aesthetic, and uses the motif of ‘walking’ to show how the aesthetic can be rendered in terms of ‘the mundane search’ and how this search spans everyday experience and cultural re‐production. We offer a provisional definition of social aesthetics as the embedded and embodied process of meaning making which, by acknowledging the physical/corporeal boundaries and qualities of the inhabited world, also allows imagination to travel across other spaces and times. It is hoped that this approach can be a useful platform for further inquiry.     

Genre,suicide et sexualité(s) en Algérie

According to a popular and widespread belief, suicide is a rare phenomenon, if not absent at all, in Muslim societies. It is considered as a sociologically irrelevant because of the cognitive power and efficacy of religion. This idea is reinforced by the upheaval of suicide bombings and terrorism, the clamour of which conceals the phenomenon of civil suicide. This article will explore civil suicide through interviews held in Algeria, in which suicide is described as a more feminine, young and rural phenomena. These three dimensions are marginal in social science studies on ‘Islamic’ suicide, which are mainly centred on a Durkheimian analysis – that is to say an analysis which considers suicide as an essentially urban and male phenomenon, far from gender issues and conformed to dominant regimes of discourse.     

Political Narratives and the Production of Legitimacy: The Case of Corruption in Post-Mao China

China watchers have predicted that corruption would lead to a crisis for the ruling regime. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party has somehow managed to retain and even strengthen its political legitimacy. This article analyzes corruption not as a crime or a political problem but as a topic of political narratives, thereby revealing the political processes which led to this result. This study, based on interviews and archival data, examines narratives on the topic of corruption produced in the post-Mao era by the ruling regime and political dissidents in their struggle to influence the populace's views on political legitimacy. In the 1980s, disgruntled intellectuals drew upon the traditionalist collective narrative of corruption to teach citizens to blame the leadership and the structure of the government for social problems, essentially rewriting the narratives used to assess and judge the regime. In doing so, they successfully threatened the political authority of the Party-state. However, in the 1990s, China's leaders and the official media revised the story of corruption so that the Party-state battled corruption on behalf of its citizens in order to bring them economic opportunities, rising living standards, and social stability. In these new narratives, the role of the state was no longer that of ideological or moral leadership, but of economic management. Through these narratives of economic management, the regime managed to control the corruption crisis and recapture its political legitimacy, but was also forced to deal with the consequences of this new vision of state-society relations.     

Sense and sensibility: cohabitation in ‘cohabitation land’

In many European countries, cohabitation has become a prevailing practice. Norway is one of the countries leading this trend; cohabitation before marriage is the norm and a majority of couples become parents before they (eventually) marry. This article explores the meaning of cohabitation for Norwegian couples today through a qualitative analysis of interviews with 17 urban, heterosexual couples. As the trend towards increased cohabitation has emerged so strongly in Norway, such analysis may provide important insights into the possible implications of more widespread cohabitation in Europe. Why is cohabitation so attractive to young Norwegians today? Why do most couples postpone marriage until after they have children? The main finding is that cohabitation in this context is understood as acting according to important norms about intimate relationships. Cohabitation is a way of dealing with the complexity of attitudes towards love and relationships in late modernity. The option of living together outside marriage makes it possible for couples to be sensible (not committing themselves ‘too much’) as well as living together when they want to develop a relationship and are ‘in love’.     

Conflicting temporalities and the unsustainability of the Italian model of migrant personal care assistant

In Southern Europe, the migrant-in-the-family model has become a structural component of the elderly care regime. However, home care work is, by its nature, poorly reconcilable with private and family life. In fact, several studies have denounced the limitations on the right to private and family life that these workers suffer. In this article, I use the migrant home care assistants’ experience of conflicting temporalities around the work–life balance as lens through which to show the social unsustainability of the Italian model of home care assistant. This paper is based on broader research conducted between 2018 and 2020 in Padua (Italy) on Moldovan female migrant workers. As part of this research, 30 semi-structured interviews were collected with Moldovan workers employed – at the time of the interview or in the past – in home care for elderly people, in a live-in or live-out regime.     

The white native speaker and inequality regimes in the private English language school

Private English language schools market the language as a tool that helps one connect with others from different cultures. Despite their promotion of English aiding in intercultural communication, these institutions may believe that only the white native speaker is the ideal teacher of the language. This valuing of the white native speaker can consequently act as an organisational inequality regime that marginalises nonwhite teachers. Using qualitative interviews with 10 nonwhite instructors working in schools in Toronto, Canada, this article investigates the ways in which these teachers experience the inequality regime of the white native speaker at work. The findings indicate that the teachers experience this inequality regime as a series of microaggressions that involve space, competence and customer desire. The article concludes with suggestions to dismantle inequality regimes in private institutions.     

Le travail vu par les assistés : éléments pour une sociologie des politiques d’insertion

The relations between “assistance” and “work” are seen from the viewpoint of the beneficiaries of welfare services for integrating them in the world of work. Material was collected during 70 semi-directive interviews with recipients of the minimal welfare payment program (RMI) who had valid “contracts of integration” in three local authorities in the Île-de-France region between 2005 and 2007. The relations of these persons to work differ as a function of their attachment to the norm of autonomy, their resistance to stigmatization and their guilt feelings. They very much depend on beneficiaries’ sociodemographic characteristics and quite diverse backgrounds and itineraries. Three types of relations to the world of work have been detected that enable us to empirically verify the postulate that the most disadvantaged categories have difficulty appropriating the currently widespread norm of individual autonomy.     

‘All my worldly goods I share with you’? Managing money at the transition to heterosexual marriage

Studies in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that financial arrangements in marriage tended to disadvantage women, especially those with young children. However, much of that research focused upon relatively well‐established married (or remarried) couples, and we have little insight into the choices that today's newly‐weds are making, or what influences their choices. To address this gap in our understanding, in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with forty‐two heterosexual couples on the brink of their first marriage. We explored their monetary practices and the way that they thought about money in the relationship. The results of a grounded theory analysis showed that six couples were pooling all or most of their money, fifteen were using a partial‐pooling system, twenty were using an independent management system (with separate accounts), and one couple had an arrangement where all the money was controlled and managed by one partner. A key factor was perceived ownership of money, and this influenced the extent to which finances were being merged and treated as a collective resource. Other factors included the couple's current living arrangements and beliefs about the importance of sharing and independence within the relationship.     

“Taking Back a Little Bit of Control”: Managing the Contaminated Body Through Consumption

In this article, we explore the lived experience of avoiding environmental chemicals through safer consumption, such as buying “eco‐friendly” products. Using focus groups and in‐depth interviews involving 50 subjects, we investigate how individuals become aware of environmental chemicals and how they adapt to this awareness. Our participants describe being surprised or alarmed to learn that chemicals are present in food and commodities that they believed were safe. They respond by developing a set of heuristics rendering the “dangerous” consumer landscape into a space that is amenable to personal control. They learn to read an ingredient label and look for organic certification seals on product packaging. We develop the idea of the “contingent boundary” to describe how participants perceive personal control as uneven: they believe they can activate a protective boundary in local and familiar contexts, but outside these contexts, they believe the boundary dissolves. They accept this contingency as normal and describe having to ignore some chemical exposures, for fear of becoming too “crazy.” We conclude that the individuals in our study accept that inverted quarantine (Szasz 2007) is out of reach, and instead try to impose order upon a ubiquitous risk.     

Hearing/seeing dread: thought of distortion and transformation in Kafka’s The Burrow and Odradek

In Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow, an unidentified subterranean creature struggles while digging in a burrow, constantly engulfed in anxiety for potential intruders. His obsessive anxiety starts to be materialised in his hearing of a noise everywhere and at constant intensity. Incessantly speculating the cause of this noise, his dreadful imagination first finds it as a swarm of small fries, eventually growing into a single gigantic monster threatening his burrow, as if desiring an irresistible entity that goes beyond the idea of the individual. Inspired by this story of a creature suffocating from his lonesome effort of nesting, this paper discusses how an individual sensation of dread could potentially transcend to an ability to imagine social totality, drawing on the philosophical readings of Kafka’s other character Odradek by Benjamin and Adorno. I further argue that this process is aesthetic, correlating Freud’s idea of the uncanny with Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience which examine the negotiation between individuation and socialisation in an experience of desubjectification. By sketching out the anxious hearing in The Burrow in reference to the disturbing seeing of object-creature Odradek, I discuss the feeling of dread that marks the transformation of individual entities into a transcendent social/collective being.     

A Story of Post‐Fordist Exploitation: Financialization and Small‐Scale Maize Farmers in Turkey

After the implementation of economic restructuring policies in Turkish agriculture, farming communities experienced significant changes in the patterns of agricultural production over the last decade. The dramatic shift from labor‐intensive field crops to maize farming represents such a change, particularly for small‐scale farmers, since high‐yield maize farming is driven by private agrifood corporate demand. In this article, I explore how this shift influences the relations of production in agriculture through a commodity‐system analysis of the maize sector in Turkey. Through the qualitative analysis of the semistructured in‐depth interviews and secondary data, I find that small‐scale farmers are able to participate in maize farming, even as their dependence on production credits to participate in industrial maize farming crucially reduces their bargaining power with private industry. I argue that the traditional Marxist approach, accumulation by dispossession, is not sufficient to explain the participation of small‐scale farmers. Instead, I propose a new concept, entrepreneurial exploitation, to describe the participation of small‐scale investors in the post‐Fordist regime. Thereby, I point to the important role of expansion of credit markets as a consequence of financialization.     

Reconfiguring Worker Subjectivity: Career Advice Literature and the “Branding” of the Worker's Self

Career advice literature, commonly used by many job seekers, has increasingly exhibited an emphasis on “personal branding,” an economic discourse that invites workers to conceive of themselves as profit‐generating enterprises. In this article, we examine the meanings that personal branding provokes in the minds of precariously employed white‐collar workers in Boston. We use interviews conducted with 62 white‐collar workers and job seekers to explore the utility of Foucauldian theories of governmentality, which have received little attention within American sociology. Results suggest that precariously employed workers do feel pressured to incorporate personal branding into their orientations toward both self and work, much as Foucauldian theory expects. Yet our findings also identify important exceptions to this pattern, with smaller proportions of workers engaging in outward accommodation of self‐branding discourse, or else explicit contestation of its terms. We conclude that Foucauldian theories of the “enterprising self” warrant more widespread consideration among American sociologists, hopefully opening up a stronger understanding of counterconduct, one of the theory's notable blind spots to date.