Collective and State Violence in the Palestinian‐Israeli Conflict: The Limits of Classical Rational‐Choice Theory

Many analysts continue to invoke narrow, market‐based forms of rational‐choice theory despite the call for a historically specific and culturally sensitive version of the theory. This paper demonstrates the limits of classical rational‐choice theory empirically by summarizing some results of a recently completed research project on the Palestinian insurgency and Israeli state response over the period 1987 to 2007. After first establishing the existence of several important patterns of collective and state violence that are anomalous from the viewpoint of classical rational‐choice theory, it proposes a model of situationally defined rational action that increases explained variation in the frequency of suicide attacks and state‐directed assassinations. The analysis leads to the conclusion that, while insurgents and state actors behave rationally, their rationality is culturally and historically contingent, which is to say that it takes different forms in different contexts.     

The Construction and Use of Hope within Health‐Settings: Recent Developments in Qualitative Research and Ethnographic Studies

Qualitative and ethnographic studies within sociology and anthropology have paid increasing attention to the concept of hope. This review focuses on the analysis of hope within contexts of health and healthcare. An all‐compassing definition has continued to prove elusive, though studies have brought forth useful insights on the conceptualization and nature of hope. The article explores three common themes which emerged from recent literature. The first theme emphasizes different ways in which hope is enacted by people to ensure that hope can be maintained. The second theme focuses on the ways hope can transcend different frames of future time through the imagination of future possibilities, as well as moving people to cross‐geographical and imaginative borders. Finally, the third theme highlights insights into tensions that seem to be inherent to hoping. Hope proves to be ambivalent, as there always remains a possibility that the future which people imagined is not realized. The review shows that more empirical material is needed to understand how people deal with these tensions and how these tensions relate to the fluctuating nature and experience of hope. This offers interesting directions for further research on hope, both within and outside the context of health and healthcare.     

Between inequality and difference: the creole world in the twenty‐first century

A major theme in contemporary social theory is the questioning and destabilization of boundaries – self/other, culture/nature and gender being the most obvious areas. Not least for this reason, creole identities, ostensibly premised on openness and mixing, deserve renewed attention. Although the term creolization, as borrowed from linguistics, is sometimes used in a broad comparative sense, the creole world refers to the outcome of a particular historical experience, namely that of displacement, slavery, emancipation and its aftermath reverberating into the present. Key terms are uprootedness, cultural mixing and creole languages existing in diglossic situations with metropolitan ones. Creole intellectuals in the Caribbean have celebrated the cultural creativity characteristic of these societies but have been criticized for ignoring class, racism and gender issues. By embracing the egalitarianism and openness of creoledom, they have become vulnerable to criticism of being handmaidens of neoliberalism or neocolonialism. Controversies over creole identity are related to fundamental questions in anthropology. Drawing on material mainly from the Indian Ocean region, in this article I attempt to create a dialogue between debates over creole identity and theoretical questions raised in social and cultural theory concerning the relationship between cultural difference and social inequality.     

Relations Between Mother‐Child Interactions and the Neural Correlates of Face Processing in 6‐Month‐Olds

Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age‐related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6‐month‐olds because this age is frequently noted in the behavioral and neurophysiological literature as a time of transition in which infants begin to discriminate more readily between caregivers and unfamiliar adults. We used infants' behavioral responses to an original behavioral paradigm to predict event‐related potential (ERP) responses to pictures of the mother's face and a stranger's face in the same group of participants. Our results suggest that individual differences in infants' proximity‐seeking behaviors during interactions with the mother correlate with their neurophysiological responses to the mother's face as opposed to an unfamiliar face for the Nc component of the ERP. These results have implications for understanding the role of the changing infant‐caregiver relationship on the development of the face processing system in early infancy.     

The Tragedy of the Atmospheric Commons: Discounting Future Costs and Risks in Pursuit of Immediate Fossil‐Fuel Benefits

One of the most significant positive approaches to the politics of climate change on the scale required by the problem is that of Giddens. This paper uncovers weaknesses in his argument and reveals motivational divergence for mitigation and energy security in both Canada and New Zealand, which is opposite to what occurred in Northern Europe that provided the basis for his analysis. This suggests that the response to climate change varies according to deeper cultural and geophysical structures. The paper also examines cost(risk)‐benefit analysis versus the precautionary principle, the directionality of political‐economic convergence with mitigation, and political partisanship concerning climate change. It documents the complexity of making near‐term economic opportunities converge with mitigation of distant harm.     

The Boom‐Bust‐Recovery Cycle: Dynamics of Change in Community Satisfaction and Social Integration in Delta,Utah*

Abstract To better understand the long‐term effects of rapid boom growth, we reexamine four subjective indicators of community satisfaction and social integration in Delta, Utah, that were originally analyzed by Brown, Geertsen, and Krannich in 1989. With 24 years of longitudinal data, we find that within approximately a decade of the boom period three of the four indicators returned to or exceeded pre‐boom levels. We argue that we need to modify our theories and vocabulary regarding boomtowns to account for a “boom‐bust‐recovery cycle” that better takes into consideration the dynamic nature of communities and their residents and how they subjectively adjust to shifts in objective conditions.     

Still the Weakest Link: The Domestic Financial System and post‐1998 Recovery in East Asia

To what extent and within what timeframe did countries in East Asia recover from the 1997‐8 financial crisis, and, if there has been a recovery, can it be sustained? Drawing on the available evidence, this article attempts to answer these questions. By implication, however, it also has something to say about the vulnerability of the region to subsequent crises and briefly considers what needs to be done to reduce this.     

Seeing the Case Clearly: File‐Work,Material Mediation,and Visualizing Practices in a Dutch Criminal Court

In Dutch criminal courts, judges and their assisting clerks spend significant amounts of time doing file‐work in preparation for the court hearing: a practice they often call “visualizing the case.” This practice is distributed over clerks and judges and materially mediated: the legal case file enters into face‐to‐file interaction as both a text and a material object. This article aims to unpack what techniques clerks and judges draw on in order to come to “see the case clearly,” while at the same time it elaborates on the renegotiations of these largely paper‐based practices when court workers are confronted with the digitization of case files.     

Between the state and global civil society: non‐official experts and their network in the Asia‐Pacific, 1925–45

This article stresses the need for a more rigorous scrutiny of the power structure in which an expert network produces its ‘expert knowledge’. It defines a pioneering multinational expert network in the Asia‐Pacific region in the interwar years as a prototype of an epistemic community, and examines how far it challenged the state‐centred and North Atlantic‐centred dominant structure of international politics, and became ‘global’. In this article I argue that this particular network largely reinforced the dominant structure. This meant that it remained inter‐national and colonial, and served the interests of the state/empire, neither becoming global nor advancing a universalist cause for the global civil society. The failure owes a lot to historical circumstances. Yet this case study also demonstrates that the structure in which the expert network produced specific knowledge is still dominant and that a constant scrutiny of the role of an expert network remains critical.     

The International Monetary Fund,Structural Adjustment,and Women's Health: A Cross‐National Analysis of Maternal Mortality in Sub‐Saharan Africa

We conduct a cross‐national analysis to test the dependency theory hypothesis that International Monetary Fund structural adjustment adversely impacts maternal mortality in sub‐Saharan Africa. We use generalized least square random effects regression models and modified two‐step Heckman models that correct for endogeneity using data on 37 African nations with up to four time points (1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005). We find support for our hypothesis, which indicates that sub‐Saharan African nations that receive an International Monetary Fund structural adjustment loan tend to have higher levels of maternal mortality than sub‐Saharan African nations that do not receive such a loan. This finding remains stable when controlling for endogeneity related to whether or not a sub‐Saharan African nation receives a structural adjustment loan. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications, methodological implications, policy suggestions, and possible directions for future research.     

The Interplay Between Gender and Structure: Dynamics of Adolescent Friendships in Single‐Gender Classes and Mixed‐Gender Classes

This study reviews theories on striving for closure in adolescent networks related to trust issues of adolescents and further examines whether adolescents in mixed‐gender and single‐gender classes are different in striving for closure. Stochastic actor‐based models for network dynamics are applied to test our hypotheses based on longitudinal friendship nominations of 406 Taiwanese adolescents in mixed‐gender, all‐boy, and all‐girl classes. The results show that adolescents strive for closure through connections of friends' friends. Further, the results reveal that while the tendency toward closure is stronger for girls in mixed‐gender classes, such tendency toward closure is stronger in all‐boy classes than in all‐girl classes. Testing effects between types of classes supports the indications of variances in striving closure.     

Gender‐ and Age‐Related Differences in the Association Between Social Relationship Quality and Trait Levels of Salivary Cortisol

The majority of studies linking individual differences in the quality of social relationships and activity of the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis have focused on the early development of attachment between infants and their caregivers. Later in development, during middle childhood and adolescence, the parallel HPA links to age‐appropriate social relationships with peers, parents, and siblings remain largely unspecified. This study addressed this knowledge gap. Early morning saliva samples were obtained from 367 children in middle childhood (ages 6–10) and 357 adolescents (M age=11–16 years) on two successive days 1 year apart and assayed for cortisol. Latent state–trait modeling was employed to separate variance in cortisol levels attributable to “stable trait‐like” versus “state or situational specific” sources to minimize the high moment‐to‐moment variation in basal adrenocortical activity. During adolescence but not middle childhood, and for girls but not boys, lower levels of “trait cortisol” were associated with poor quality social relationships. The pattern was robust, extending to the quality of relationships with parents, siblings, and peers. Importantly, the relationship was independent of the rates of internalizing or externalizing problem behavior. We found that isolating the variance in cortisol levels attributable to stable intrinsic sources revealed an interpretable pattern that linked individual differences in basal HPA activity to social relationships during adolescence. Studies are needed to reveal the biosocial mechanisms involved in the establishment of this gender‐ and age‐specific phenomenon and to decipher whether or not individual differences in this hormone‐behavior link are adaptive.     

Perceptions of Structural Injustice and Efficacy: Participation in Low/Moderate/High‐Cost Forms of Collective Action

Prior studies on perceptions of structural disadvantage and injustice, efficacy, and collective action have suffered from two major limitations: (1) they have used single‐country samples, usually of economically advanced countries, and (2) generally theorized and investigated perceptions of structural injustice and efficacy separately. Drawing on value‐expectancy theory, we provide an integrated theory to predict direct and conditional effects of efficacy and perceptions of structural disadvantage and injustice on collective action within countries. To address the limitations of previous research, we use cross‐national data of 29 countries, including economically advanced and less advanced nations, to test how well these hypotheses explain within‐country variation in collective action. We find that internal efficacy is significantly and positively associated with low‐ and moderate‐cost collective action, whereas organizational embeddedness, a proxy for political efficacy, is significantly and positively associated with low‐, moderate‐, and high‐cost collective action. Perceptions of legitimate and unjust structural disadvantage are also positively associated with all types of collective action. Importantly, the positive effects of both types of efficacy on high‐cost collective action are conditional on perceptions of structural injustice. That is, participation in high‐cost collective action is more likely for those who are both efficacious and perceive structural disadvantage as unjust.     

Healthcare Use in the Heartland: How Health Care Selection Varies Between Rural,Retirement‐Age Migrants and Long‐Term Residents

One increasingly important problem affecting rural health care selection is the tendency of older residents to bypass local health care providers. This research investigates how the effects of community characteristics and attachment on health care bypass behavior vary between rural retirement‐age migrants and retirement‐age long‐term residents. Non‐health‐related behaviors, such as purchasing goods and services outside one's community during a health care trip, that is, “outshopping,” could influence bypass if individuals combine trips for their medical care with other consumer needs. Basing our work on the outshopping theory, we argue that bypass behavior is one facet of consumer consumption patterns for both rural retirement‐age migrants and long‐term residents. In addition, dissatisfaction with local health care and services like shopping can “push” rural residents to bypass local health care and travel greater distances for primary health care. We further contend that strong community attachment has an opposite “pull” effect that can help to negate the push of outshopping and reduce the likelihood of bypass. Our results reveal retirement‐age migrants are significantly more likely to bypass local primary health care providers than retirement‐age long‐term residents. Furthermore, our analysis bridges the rural health care and retirement community development literature to suggest that outshopping theory can now be applied to rural primary health care bypass behavior.