INCOME SMOOTHING AND SELF-CONTROL: THE CASE OF SCHOOLTEACHERS

Approximately one-half of California's Unified School Districts give teachers a choice of receiving their annual salaries in 10 or 12 monthly payments. Intertemporal utility maximization à la Irving Fisher suggests that they should choose 10 payments and earn interest on their savings. But about 50% of the teachers choose 12 installments, even though when summed over a reasonable period the forgone interest can be considerable. This behavior can be explained by the cost of exercising self-control and by Laibson's model of hyperbolic discounting. A survey of teachers supports this interpretation. (JEL D91 , D12 )     

REREADING THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

This paper employs a proposed alterity discourse analysis (ADA) framework to argue that The Passing of Traditional Society – the bible of the modernization paradigm of development communication research – exemplifies far less a discourse on the relationship between empathy and development, as it does on the political/ideological imperatives governing the construction of the Other (i.e. the Middle East) by the Self (i.e. the US). To substantiate this claim, the paper debunks the book's claim to social scientific objectivity by pinpointing the methodological shortcomings of the empathy model and of the Middle East project from which the model was derived, and highlights the paradigm's dogma by revealing the religious metaphors with which the book's narrative is infused.     

THE PERCEPTION OF MAN AND THE CONCEPTION OF SOCIETY: TWO APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY

The social sciences offer two distinct approaches to understanding society. One originated with the Scottish moral philosophers and shaped the discipline of economics. The other emerged from the French enlightenment and influenced the study of sociology. The two approaches are based on radically different perceptions of man and man's relation to society. This paper explores these alternative hypotheses and examines some major implications. It concludes that the hypothesis reaching back to the Scottish philosophers provides the basis for a unified approach in the social sciences.     

NARRATIVES AND THE CONSTITUTION OF A COMMON IDENTITY: THE KAREN IN BURMA

This research was conducted in an informal school located in Thailand at the border with Myanmar (Burma) and supervised by the Karen National Union (KNU). The KNU has claimed and fought for political autonomy and independence from the Burmese government for more than a half century. The authors examine how, in their narratives about what it means to be Karen, future Karen leaders try to deal with challenges to a sense of Karen unity and “groupness,” and to the legitimacy of the Karen struggle. One important challenge is the substantial cultural, religious, linguistic, and geographical internal diversity. Establishing a coherent Karen identity among the different subgroups is a continuing struggle for Karen leaders. Another is the negative labeling of the KNU as stubborn people and violent terrorists. These labels endanger the political project, the international reputation, and the local attractiveness of the KNU.     

NGOS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN BULGARIA AND THE USA

This study examines the development of civil society and its ability to facilitate stronger democratic practices in Bulgaria using the USA as a comparison. Using data gathered from surveys of NGOs in 2006, we examine three sets of questions. First, what is the level of NGO organizational capacity? Second, to what degree are NGOs performing their mediating roles? Third, how do NGOs perceive their effectiveness in working with the state and its citizens. Our findings suggest that Bulgarian NGOs face a number of challenges when compared with US NGOs, which affect their ability to engage in civil society activities such as establishing horizontal ties with citizens and other groups.     

MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF ANSWERING MACHINES

Answering machines have become one of the major challenges toobtaining high response rates in telephone surveys. This articlepresents some data that may be helpful in answering two questionsthat frequently arise: (1) What are the chances that additionalcalls to a household known to use an answering machine willresult in a completed interview? (2) When is the best time tocall, in order to minimize the chances of encountering an answeringmachine? The data used to analyze these questions are basedon the calling records of the 1990 California Disability Survey,a large random-digit dialing survey that generated about 330,000calls and completed interviews at over 24,000 house holds. Thislarge number of calls is interesting not only in absolute termsbut because of the high number of callbacks that they represent,designed to bring the response rate up over 80 percent. Therecords of calls analyzed here, consequently, can show convincinglywhat really happens when 10, 20, 30, or even more callbacksare attempted. Such opportunities are rare. Researchers cantake advantage of these results to generate more informed callingstrategies and consequently improve response rates in theirsurveys.     

A POSITIVE THEORY OF DISCRETIONARY POLICY, THE COST OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT AND THE BENEFITS OF A CONSTITUTION

We offer an explanation of government's preference for discretionary policy action. The main elements are asymmetric information and the ability and desire of governments to maximize reelection prospects. Discretionary policy imposes a social cost. We show that the cost is eliminated if all voters have the same information as the government. An optimal, state contingent policy rule that precommits government through a constitution eliminates the cost by removing government's opportunities to exploit its informational advantage. Rules of this kind, and constitutional restrictions, are difficult to enforce in the presence of uncertainty and different information available to government and the public.     

VIRTUAL LEARNING AND THE NETWORK SOCIETY

A wide variety of organizational structures and technologies are associated with the 'virtual campus'. This paper compares the UK's two largest distance learning initiatives: the Open University (OU) and the University for Industry (UfI). The comparison suggests four alternative approaches to 'virtualization' and shows that debate has often under-estimated the variety of possible approaches. The relationship between ICTs, knowledge and organizational structure is complex, reflecting a diversity of values and rationalities embodied by learning institutions.     

RISK SOCIETY,MEDIA, AND POWER: THE CASE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

Risk society theory posits that the transformation of industrial to postindustrial society corresponded with a transformation of societal power structured by capital, to one structured by the ability to define risk. Perceptions of risk are, in part, socially constructed and created through the framing efforts of various institutional actors. The resulting struggle over meaning is particularly acute when the issues contain many unknown elements—as is the case with emerging technologies. Applying insights from media studies, frame analysis, and organizational theory, we analyze coverage of nanotechnology (NT) in popular press, trade, and general science publications. The findings document the extent to which the risks of this emerging technology are presented or ignored across, between, and within organizational subfields. The analysis empirically assesses a key proposition of risk society theory and reveals how institutional processes reflect and reproduce power differentials. We discuss the implications of the empirical findings for sociological theories of risk and society, power, and collective action.     

NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,POPULISM AND THE POLITICS OF THE LIFEWORLD

Since the 1960s, New Social Movements (NSMs) have been prominent as new actors on the political scene. But, by comparison with other radical political agents, they have made a relatively poor showing in mainstream political theory. Habermas, for example, criticizes NSMs, including second-wave feminism, for merely masquerading as new forms of radical political agency. By introducing some ideas from Laclau, I show how to counter Habermas's criticism. I then rethink NSMs as a new post-liberal form of democratic-emancipatory political agency, which by contrast with the politics of the public sphere that Habermas champions, is anchored in the less organized reaches of the lifeworld.     

THE HI/STORIES OF HONG KONG

This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the ‘local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation in the rural and everyday space of colonial Hong Kong. It is stressed that to piece together the above anomalies is not an attempt to restore a pre-given ‘native’ to but rather an endeavour to examine how the ‘local’ as divergent historical agents shaped and has been shaped by the political, social, and economic environment of Hong Kong and the larger world outside. This can be called a model of dialectics composed of an internal dialectic and a dialectic of articulation. In this regard, with the benefit of the rapprochement of history and anthropology and a non-linear view of history, this paper is a historical bricolage of the anomalous history of Hong Kong, aiming to destabilize the Hong Kong historical grand narrative. Through rethinking the impact of the colonial experience, this paper hopes to liberate alterity and diversity in historical interpretations and imaginations.     

THE INFORMATIZATION OF THE WORLDVIEW

The development of information and communication technology in the second half of the twentieth century in crucial respects resembles the development of mechanics in the sixteenth and seventeenth century as it has been described by Dijksterhuis in his study The Mechanization of the World Picture (first published in 1950). In both cases specific technological developments not only lead to important changes in the natural and human sciences, but also profoundly affect culture as a whole and eventually result in a fundamental change in worldview. In this article the author attempts to elucidate the present informatization of the worldview in a twofold way. First, against the background of Dijksterhuis' analysis of the concept of mechane, a clarification is given of the concept of information, which has become central to many sciences in the last decades. It is argued that much of the confusion and misuse that surrounds the application of this concept can be reduced by making a careful distinction between the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic dimensions of information. Second, on basis of this clarification, the author discusses the transformation from a mechanistic to an informationistic worldview. While the mechanistic worldview is characterized by the postulates of analysability, lawfulness and controllability, the informationistic worldview is characterized by the postulates of synthetizability, programmability and manipulability. It is argued that although the informationistic worldview in some respects (for instance in its mathematical orientation) is clearly a continuation of the mechanistic worldview, in other respects it fundamentally alters human experience and the evaluation of, and association with, reality.     

COMMUNITY AND THE PUBLIC BODY IN BREAST CANCER MEDIA ACTIVISM

In this article, I consider how communities form around health care advocacy and activism. My concern is the place of visual media in the politics of breast cancer. Art photography and film are considered against mainstream images and media campaigns focusing on breast cancer. The primary work considered is the self-portrait photography of the artist Matuschka and the film The Body Beautiful by Ngozi Onwurah. I argue that these alternative texts help us to think about the ways in which issues such as race, age and beauty are key aspects in the experience of breast cancer, and not tangential cultural issues or ‘appearance-related side effects’, as one breast cancer support programme puts it.     

THE SUCCESS OF THE FED AND THE DEATH OF MONETARISM

We propose an explanation for the demise of monetarism in the United States. We show that optimal monetary policy would lead to zero correlation between monetary aggregates and inflation if the effect of monetary aggregates on inflation is known precisely and to negative correlations if there is coefficient uncertainty. From 1960 to 1982 the correlation of the monetary base and inflation was positive and so the variance in the growth rate of monetary base in the United States was clearly too large monetary base growth destabilized inflation. However, from 1983 to 2003 variations in monetary base growth were clearly stabilizing and could have been just right. ( JEL E52, E31, E32)