BEQUEST RECEIPT AND FAMILY SIZE EFFECTS

This article tests the connection between credit constraints and negative family size effects on child earnings using bequest receipt to signal access to credit markets. The dominant economic model of fertility predicts a negative relationship between family size and child achievement. In the model, limits on borrowing create this "quality-quantity trade-off." This article tests for the relevance of credit constraints using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data to compare family size effects across groups defined by bequest receipt. Contrary to the credit constraints explanation, those receiving large bequests exhibit large family size effects, while those not receiving bequests show little to no effect . ( JEL J13, D1, I2)     

Bequest Expectations: Evidence from the 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances

This study uses the 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances to examine the effects of respondents' characteristics on their expectations of receiving inheritances and leaving bequests, based on altruistic bequest theory. The results of logistic regression analysis suggest that respondents' sociodemographic characteristics such as education, marital status, race, presence of living parents, and number of siblings significantly affect their anticipation of receiving an inheritance. People's expectations of leaving a bequest are found to be positively and significantly related to the value of nonliquid asset holdings, education, marital status, and positive attitude toward bequests but inversely associated with the total number of children in the household and being disabled. Those who are self-employed and middle-aged are more likely to anticipate leaving bequests.     

Playing by the rules: Restricted endowment assets in colleges and universities

Endowments serve as financial buffers and safety nets for post‐secondary institutions in uncertain financial times. Donor‐restricted gifts and bequests often complicate the management and deployment of endowment assets. Public policy concerns, the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Acts, and related case law are changing approaches used by states to alter the donors' “dead hand” when time and circumstances make carrying out conditions of restricted bequests unworkable.     

Bequests and family traditions: the case of nineteenth century France

Like father, like son: is the bequest behavior of children “inherited” from that of their parents? Most economic models (altruistic, paternalistic or exchange models) postulate that bequest behavior does not depend per se on parents’ behavior. Yet because of data limitations, few empirical studies have analyzed the link between bequests left and inheritances received. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of inheritance relative to lifetime income on the amount that individuals bequeath, in the case of France. This study uses original historical data including wealth genealogies covering the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries for the Loire Inférieure département. Empirical evidence suggests that the propensity to bequeath is much greater for inheritance than for human resources: a deceased having inherited twice the average wealth leaves 35–60 % more to his own heirs that the average for his generation. In nineteenth century France, bequests are explained more by inheritance received than by personal savings per se.     

"Race" as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: W.E.B. Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" Thesis Revisited

This article reports on a study of interaction between Americans who self-identify as Black and White that reveals underlying expectations with regard to conversation that differ between the two groups. These differences seem not to have much to do with class or gender, but rather vary largely according to self-identification by "race." The argument of this paper will be that the social phenomena of "race" are constructed at the level of interaction whenever Americans self-identified as Black and White speak to one another. This is because the Interaction Order expectations with regard to both self and community vary between the two groups. Because the "language games" and conversational "preferences" practiced by the two groups are responsive to different Interaction Orders, the "working consensus" is substantially different, and as a consequence, conversational "moves" are not recognizably the same. It will be argued that a great deal of institutional discrimination against African Americans can be traced to this source.     

A note on altruism and caregiving in the family: do prices matter?

Exchanges of work for money and altruism are two alternative explanations for bequests, transfers from children to older parents, and in-family caregiving. Such exchanges may also occur in couples living together and are therefore a major theme in economic analyses of marriage. This note emphasizes two ways that the literature on altruism and inter-generational monetary transfers and the economic literature on marriage can enrich each other: the concept of price for in-family caregiving can be expanded along the lines of the analysis of Work-In-Household and market analyses of marriage can pay more attention to altruism as an alternative explanation for observed behaviors such as labor supply or consumption.     

The Dilemma of "Authentic Self" Ideology in Contemporary Japan

This paper examines dilemmas inherent in the pursuit of the modern ideology of "authentic self", which first emerged in the 1960s and is now widespread in contemporary cultures. The ideology is exemplified, in a religious scene, as "self-transformative" religions wherein seekers seek to transform themselves spiritually in order to realize their authentic, or "sacred" selves. Through an examination of Aum Shinrikyo, which began as a typical "self-transformative" religion but later transformed into a destructive cult, I will explain the intrinsic moral imperatives of the ideology of "authenticity". This study of Aum explores the introverted lifestyle and extreme desocialization, which resulted in obsession with the central guru, being legitimated by the ideology. This search for "authenticity" resulted in the members cutting themselves off from the reality of the world. The final analysis suggests that possible consequences of the endless pursuit of the "authentic self" are a "vacuum" self and a loss of empathy with other people. The ontological conditions created by this bring about potential destructiveness, either internal or external.     

LOW-INCOME "SINGLE MOMS" IN ISRAEL: Redefining the Gender Contract

This article on low-income "one-parent mothers" in Israel is based on 32 in-depth interviews and supportive data from a longitudinal study. Findings problematize scholarly treatments of "single mothers" as a universal category, showing it to be culturally specific and polysemic. It is argued that low-income one-parent mothers embody a central tension in the Israeli male-breadwinner/female-caretaker gender contract, as its initial class bias is exacerbated by the dissolution of marriage. By simultaneously adopting and reformulating the hegemonic schema that frames their femininity as deficient, they expose the dual character of the contract as resistant to change and dynamic.     

Bequest Motives, Social Security, and Economic Growth

This article conducts a systematic analysis of four bequest motives in a simple model of endogenous growth. It analyzes how bequest motives affect fertility, savings, growth, and the effects of pay-as-you-go Social Security. It is found that altruistic and exchange motives give equivalent outcomes if the discount factors are set the same. The outcome under the joy-of-giving motive may involve a higher bequest ratio, higher saving, and better growth rates than that under altruism. If bequests are accidental, the equilibrium values will depend on the probability of survival. Moreover, the results provide testable implications on bequest motives.     

THE "BANALITY OF EVIL" REFRAMED: The Social Construction of the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem"

Research on the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews has arguably been dominated by historians. Yet many historians remain confounded by the Holocaust's major paradox: the "banality of evil" that occurred during the Nazi regime. In this article I argue that understanding of the "banality of evil" paradox can be advanced by reframing previously unsynthesized research in terms of a constructionist theory of social problems. I view the "Jewish problem" and its "final solution" as having a "natural history" that is characterized by the development and unfolding of claims about problems and the formulation and implementation of solutions to problems. I trace the construction of the "Jew" throughout history and as it was identified, acknowledged, and applied in a particular sociocultural and political context. By providing the first application of constructionism to a genocidal event, I show that the social processes that construct genocide parallel those that construct other social problems, and that it is precisely this correspondence that makes the construction of the "Jewish problem" and its "final solution" banal.     

"PATIENT COUNSELING" BY PHARMACISTS:

In the sociological literature and specifically within the field of conversation analysis (CA), the interactions that occur between health professionals and their clients have been the subject of much analytic work. In particular, there are several widely circulated CA studies examining the broad activity of "counseling" in a health care setting (Silverman 1997; Silverman, Perakyla and Bor 1992; Heritage and Sefi 1992), centring around the distinctions that may be made between "advice" and "information". This paper considers these distinctions in relation to "patient counseling" by pharmacists and suggests that this may be more fully understood by drawing on the less widely analyzed and distinct activity of "instruction" as described by Goldberg (1975). The wider implications of adopting a CA approach to research this kind of health-care setting are also discussed.     

"NEIGHBORS WHO MIGHT BECOME FRIENDS":

HIV is a condition that seems powerfully to define identities and communities. In some cases it appears to have generated new, culturally and politically radical forms of both. Drawing on a series of interviews over two to three years with people infected or affected by HIV, this article examines how interviewees describe their communities and identities as determined by HIV, though in partial, limited ways. The article explores how the "self" operates in the interviews, not as a consistent, reflexive project but as an occasional, situated resistance. I argue that the narrative form of the interviews was what enabled provisional, variable identities and communities to be articulated. The "coming out" genre was widely deployed to describe negotiating HIV stigma and fatality, as well as accepting and to some extent disengaging from serostatus. This genre's allowance of incompleteness also gave a place to HIV's abjection, to horrors that cannot be storied into subjective meaningfulness. Finally, the article looks at how, rather than focusing on identities or communities, interviewees told stories of citizenship, of subject positions shaped by neighborhood, national and transnational, as much as individual or group concerns.     

"A KNOCK ON THE DOOR": Managing Death in the Israeli Defense Forces

This paper discusses death that occurs within organizations through an analysis of how deaths of soldiers are handled by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). While such deaths challenge the military's organizational order and legitimacy, the IDF handles them through the institution of a "moving bureaucracy": a combination of fixed administrative procedures and intense emotional work carried out by liminal military personnel (reserve officers). This arrangement enables the military to construct a highly controlled "buffer zone" around the deceased soldier's family, and thus to reconstitute its organizational order and the IDF legitimacy. The army as a palpable organization "reappears" on the scene, but that reappearance is gradual and takes place only after the funeral, when death is certain and finalized.     

Managing unforeseen events in anesthesia: collective trade-off between "understanding" and "doing"

This study aims to describe how anesthesia teams handle unforeseen events that may affect the patients' health. More precisely, it investigates the mechanisms of decisions made by anesthesia teams to manage unthought-of situations, i.e. situations that have not been foreseen as "possible" ones before their occurrence. An empirical study, based on the analysis of simulated situations, was conducted in a pediatric anesthesia service of a university hospital in France. The results highlighted three ways of managing unthought-of situations (determined management, cautious management and overwhelmed management). They support the hypothesis of a collective cognitive trade-off, whereby teams would behave as virtual operators, with their own collective trade-off between "understanding" and "doing". The discussion of the results questions the assessment criteria, the safety perspectives we adopt and the possible ways to improve the management of unforeseen situations.     

Till Death Do Us Part: Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima,Peru

This article joins a long-standing conversation among slavery scholars regarding the tensions that emerged from the legal status of slaves as property and as persons. This feature of quasi-personhood and property was perhaps most pronounced in the testamentary devise of freedom granted by slave owners. Posthumous bequests of freedom simultaneously recognised the property rights of the deceased in human beings, while validating the affective ties of loyalty and devotion spawned by the master–slave relationship. The article traces the efforts of Margarita de Torres, an enslaved woman, who waged a nine-year lawsuit for her freedom against the executrices of her owner's estate. In so doing, the article analyses Margarita's motivations for embarking on a protracted and costly lawsuit, given the odds in favour of, and against, slaves seeking to enforce testamentary promises of manumission in seventeenth-century Lima. More broadly, the article explores the affective relationships between owners and slaves, the conditions that accompanied testamentary freedom and the complexities that arose with the legal treatment of enslaved offspring of free fathers.     

PLANNED AND UNPLANNED BEQUESTS

We distinguish between bequests that are planned as part of a lifetime optimization process and those that are the unplanned result of errors in forecasting the date of death. Given the initial endowment we expect a positive relation between the bequest and the planning horizon, and a negative relation between unexpectedly long life and the bequest. A unique data set on wealthy decedents and their parents provides measures of expected horizons based on parents' longevity. Both predictions are confirmed, and there is an especially large and significant positive relation between the bequest and the length of the planning horizon.     

Narratives of "Home" and "Homeland": The Symbolic Construction and Appropriation of the Sudeten German Heimat

Sport is an important arena for the construction, maintenance, and challenging of identities. This article aims to explore, using a figurational sociological perspective, the complex inter-relationship between sport, culture, and national identity with particular reference to rugby union in Ireland. The theoretical framework for the analysis of national identity put forward here seeks to make sense of national identity by considering a series of key "processual" social dynamics to shed light and raise questions on the dynamic double-bind between sport and national identity. A case study of rugby union in Ireland since 1945 is employed here to demonstrate how various sources of evidence can be "triangulated" to help unravel the relationship between rugby union and a specific "nation." Rugby union (as a global team sport now with a recognised and established World Cup) is arguably the most significant sporting arena whereby the imagined community of Ireland can become "real." This temporary union of two politically distinct nations through sport provides an interesting context for the researcher of national identity. This context will be explored by considering "official" historical accounts of Irish rugby, British media portraits of Irish rugby union, and the views of contemporary international Irish rugby players.     

Possibilities and limitations of "lesbian continuum": the case of a protestant church in Japan

"Lesbian existence" is still invisible in Japanese society, although Japan is portrayed as being "tolerant" toward homosexuality. However, there is strong activism that tries to make lesbians visible. An example is Christian women's activism against homophobic discourses in the United Church of Christ in Japan (UCCJ/Kyodan) which is a denomination of Protestant Churches in Japan. This case helps us analyse the positionality of lesbians in the discourses of Christianity in a non-Christian society, Japan. Introduced to English-speaking audiences for the first time, this case shows clearly that the forces which produce the exclusion of lesbians and gays do not only have a religious origin but also a social background. This particular religious-social context sets the gay men as the object of discrimination but brings forth resistance activism by women-lesbians, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. Such women's activism against homophobia is analyzed as an example of the "lesbian continuum" (Adrienne Rich) and the possibilities and limitations of the continuum are explored. doi:10.1300/J155v10n03_10.     

"THERE ARE SURVIVORS": Telling A Story Of Sudden Death

This article is a personal narrative of a family drama enacted in the aftermath of my brother's death in an airplane crash. "True" stories such as this fit in the space between fiction and social science, joining ethnographic and literary writing, and autobiographical and sociological understanding. My goal is to reposition readers vis a vis authors of texts of social science by acknowledging potential for optional readings and encouraging readers to "experience an experience" that can reveal not only how it was for me, but how it could be or once was for them. This experimental form permits researchers and readers to acknowledge and give voice to their own emotional experiences and encourages ethnographic subjects (co-authors) to reclaim and write their own lives.     

THE AURA OF "HIGH TECH" IN A WORLD OF MESSY PRACTICE

This study employs interlocking analytical devices from the perspectives of several disciplines to explore members' meanings through definitions of "high technology" given by workers in design engineering. The comparative analysis employs concepts from art history, sociology of culture, anthropology and science studies to explore the appeal of "high technology" in comparison with the aura of original artworks and the status accrued by symbolic tools. Additionally, the role standardization has played in the development of engineering as a profession is explored in historical context as are the recurring themes of speed and "the new." The findings reveal that how engineers use new technologies in the world of messy practice and their conceptual framework regarding so-called "high technology" do not map well onto one another. The study illustrates the perspective of science and technology studies that views all technology as socially shaped and society shaping, its construction accomplished through messy patched-up practices rather than clean, linear paths or perfect techniques.