Who’s About to Leave? A Global Survey of Aspirations and Intentions to Migrate

This article analyses aspirations and intentions to migrate based on Gallup World Poll for the period 2010–2015. We estimate individual‐level traits associated with aspirations and intentions to migrate across groups of countries in different regions and with different income levels. This paper brings together previous hypotheses regarding migration aspirations and tests them under several specifications, while keeping separate findings according to migration aspirations and intentions to appreciate differences between them. Being dissatisfied with one’s own standard of living is associated with a higher probability of desiring to move, while the relation with the actual preparation to migrate is less clear. Some individual traits remain significant across (almost) all specifications: being male, foreign‐born, highly educated, and having networks abroad are associated with higher probability of preparing for international migration. Aspects related to one’s economic situation are not consistently significant across specifications, signalling the importance of contextual analyses for these factors.     

NGOs’ transnational advocacy networks: from ‘legitimacy’ to ‘political responsibility’?

NGOs that operate as part of transnational advocacy networks face a number of ‘legitimacy challenges’ concerning their rights to participate in the shaping of global governance. Outlining the legitimacy claims that development NGOs make, the article argues that ‘legitimacy’ is a socially constructed quality that may be ascribed to an NGO by actors and stakeholders with different viewpoints. NGOs operating transnationally link disparate communities and conceptions of legitimacy, and undermine the discourse and practice of sovereignty. Therefore such NGOs will find it difficult to be universally regarded as legitimate, especially by states that hold a sovereignty‐based conception of legitimacy. However, relationships are the building blocks of networks, and efforts to improve them should not be abandoned simply because ‘legitimacy’ is too closely connected with sovereignty. In particular, NGOs ought to improve their relationships with the poor and marginalized communities whose interests they claim to promote. To this end, the concept of ‘political responsibility’ is suggested as a pragmatic approach to understanding power relations as they arise in transnational advocacy networks and campaigns.     

How to make head or tail of ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’?: addressing the methodological ambiguity1

A distinction has recently been proposed between bridging (or encompassing) and bonding (or inward-looking) social networks. However, existing theoretical contributions remain vague as to the fundamental meaning of both concepts. As a consequence, two distinct interpretations have developed alongside each other. In the present paper, we employ data on voluntary association membership in Flanders to empirically illustrate that both approaches can lead to substantially different outcomes and therefore appear to tap into different dimensions of bridging versus bonding. These findings underline the problematic nature of the current conceptual ambiguity. We conclude that should the bridging/bonding distinction add meaningfully to our understanding of the external effects of social networks, it is essential to resolve the conceptual and methodological imprecision.     

What’s Recreational about ‘Recreational Rioting’? Children on the Streets in Belfast

The purpose of this paper was to explore teenagers' perception of the concept of 'recreational rioting'. It draws on focus group discussions with 80 Catholic and Protestant teenagers who live in one of the most contested interface areas in Northern Ireland, many of whom have experience of rioting. The majority of children who took part in the research were highly critical of the connotations associated with 'recreational rioting' and their experiences of rioting calls into question the 'recreational' aspects of the practice. While many children were motivated to become involved in rioting because of 'something to do', their participation was imbued with political undertones.     

Is counseling ‘required’ with medications to treat opioid use disorder?

In “No Strings Attached: More Opioid Addicts Get Meds Without Talk Therapy,” an article by Beth Schwartzapfel of the Marshall Project published in USA Today May 9 ( https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/05/09/opioid‐crisis‐drugs‐no‐therapy/1131110001/ ), both sides were excellently reported. Kenneth B. Stoller, M.D., longtime methadone researcher from Johns Hopkins, was quoted as saying that medications without any talking is “selling patients short.” Some Twitter participants immediately charged that Stoller was kicking patients off medication if they weren't participating in counseling (which he doesn't do and the article doesn't say he does), and a protracted debate on Mother's Day led us to ask Stoller himself — who does not tweet — to respond. We copied and pasted the comments so he could see them. His response is below. (To see the Twitter thread, go to https://twitter.com/ADAWnews/status/1127175604959436800 .)     

‘Are we to become a gender university?’ Facets of resistance to a gender equality project

Gender equality (GE) is something ‘we cannot not want’. Indeed, the pursuit of equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities for all women and men throughout a society freed from gendered oppression is widely visible in recent organizational GE initiatives. In practice, however, GE initiatives often fail in challenging gendered norms and at effecting deep‐seated change. In fact, GE measures tend to encounter resistance, with a gap between saying and doing. Using a GE project at a Swedish university, we examined the changing nature of reactions to GE objectives seeking to understand why gender inequality persists in academia. We used ‘resistance’ to identify multiple, complex reactions to the project, focusing on the discursive practices of GE. Focusing our contextual analysis on change and changes in reactions enabled a process‐oriented analysis that revealed gaps where change is possible. Thus, we argue that studying change makes it possible to identify points in time where gendered discriminatory norms are more likely to occur. However, analysing discursive practices does not itself lead to change nor to action. Rather, demands for change must start with answering, in a collaborative way, what problem we are trying to solve when we start a new GE project, in order to be relevant to the specific context. Otherwise, GE risks being the captive of consensus politics and gender inequality will persist.     

What is a ‘Handbook of Sociolinguistics’?

Florian Coulmas (ed.). The Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics, 4). Oxford: Blackwell. 1997. x + 532 pp.Cloth (0–631–19339–1) £70.00.     

Is it ‘just hair’ or is it ‘everything’? Embodiment and gender repression in policing

Police department policies often require women to engage in identificatory displays inconsistent with sex category expectations. Compliance, while potentially increasing acceptance within policing, may reflect a loss of agency in aesthetic choices that limits their ability to construct gender in both the professional and personal spheres. Some women may comply without experiencing negative consequences, while others may exhibit tacit or resistant compliance reflecting their loss of agency. Women's differential reactions in response to these policies may help explain how some women become the embodiment of mythic visions associated with the profession. Through greater acceptance related to this adaptation, these women may reinforce the hostile environment experienced by other women within policing thereby propagating the status quo. In‐depth interviews with female officers and background investigators illustrate the impact of one such policy, a restrictive haircut requirement for female recruits. The results reveal that women are split in their reactions to the policy; some women comply willingly and choose to become the embodiment of the symbolic vision of policing. Others struggle with compliance as the loss of agency impacts their embodied selves through silencing their bodies.     

What Not to Wear? Girls,Clothing and ‘Showing’ the Body

Consumption practices of children in contemporary Western societies are implicated in the reconstruction of childhood, according to both popular debate and to those academic perspectives stressing the individualisation of identities within the life course of late modern consumer societies. Yet, little is known about the meanings children themselves give to their own consumption. Drawing from an ethnographic study of children aged 6–11 years and their families, the paper presents girls’ constructions of fashion in relation to their own bodies and to those of others. It is shown that although girls may both desire and actually ‘dress up’ in fashionable clothing, they present a range of contingent and contradictory meanings for doing so. For some girls, ‘dressing up’ in certain clothes may be a way of ‘ageing up’ toward feminine adulthood, albeit in restricted contexts and after negotiations between themselves and their parents as to what can be worn and where. Nonetheless, girls in the study also showed anxieties and disapproval of ‘showing the body’ through ‘revealing’ clothing. The article concludes by considering the implication of these findings for debates about gendered childhoods, and intergenerational relations in late modern consumer society.