Introduction to stochastic actor-based models for network dynamics

Stochastic actor-based models are models for network dynamics that can represent a wide variety of influences on network change, and allow to estimate parameters expressing such influences, and test corresponding hypotheses. The nodes in the network represent social actors, and the collection of ties represents a social relation. The assumptions posit that the network evolves as a stochastic process ‘driven by the actors’, i.e., the model lends itself especially for representing theories about how actors change their outgoing ties. The probabilities of tie changes are in part endogenously determined, i.e., as a function of the current network structure itself, and in part exogenously, as a function of characteristics of the nodes (‘actor covariates’) and of characteristics of pairs of nodes (‘dyadic covariates’). In an extended form, stochastic actor-based models can be used to analyze longitudinal data on social networks jointly with changing attributes of the actors: dynamics of networks and behavior.     

Assumption-aware tools and agency; an interrogation of the primary artifacts of the program evaluation and design profession in working with complex evaluands and complex contexts

Like artisans in a professional guild, we evaluators create tools to suit our ever evolving practice. The tools we use as evaluators are the primary artifacts of our profession, reflect our practice and embody an amalgamation of paradigms and assumptions. With the increasing shifts in evaluation purposes from judging program worth to understanding how programs work, the evaluator’s role is changing to that of facilitating stakeholders in a learning process. This involves clarifying purposes and choices, as well as unearthing critical assumptions. In such a role, evaluators become major tool-users and begin to innovate with small refinements or produce completely new tools to fit a specific challenge or context.We interrogate the form and function of 12 tools used by evaluators when working with complex evaluands and complex contexts. The form is described in terms of traditional qualitative techniques and particular characteristics of the elements, use and presentation of each tool. Then the function of each tool is analyzed with respect to articulating assumptions and affecting the agency of evaluators and stakeholders in complex contexts.     

NOTES ON MINCER'S LOG-EARNINGS MODEL

In his famous human capital model, Mincer provides assumptions under which a worker's annual log-earnings are a function of years of schooling and years of experience. The function has the important property, widely invoked in empirical studies, that its derivative with respect to schooling equals the rate of return to the schooling investment. It is shown here that some of Mincer's assumptions are not needed for the property to hold, but that other assumptions carry troublesome hidden implications.     

The Paradox of Disability Culture: the need to combine versus the imperative to let go

This article seeks to demonstrate that, to function as a truly emancipatory phenomenon, disability culture must be relieved of the paradox that keeps it trapped in modernist assumptions that serve to reinforce its marginalised status. The paradox of disability culture may be stated as follows. How can we claim unity without falling into the same exclusionary practices that have served to create our divisive identifications in the first place? Conversely, how can we relinquish the practices of identification that are based on binary oppositions without losing the ability to claim identities at all? I argue that, by extricating it from its origins in essentialist assumptions, disability culture can be reinvigo rated as a truly emancipatory device, which is capable of devising positive identities which, rather than celebrating the 'disabled identity', rely on its dissolution.     

Constructing the Deviant Other: Mothering and Fathering at the Workplace

Gender stereotyping is a widely described and documented process that permeates working life in western societies. It is characterized by ascribing greatly simplified attributes to women and men and forging a dualistic view of gender in which women and men are conceptualized as antipodes to each other. Through this ongoing reproduction of simplistic views; contradictions, variations and complexities are concealed, together with the richness of individuals’ competence and experiences. Intimately related to this gender stereotyping are assumptions that distinct kinds of jobs and positions fit either men or women. In this article I investigate the constructions of motherhood and fatherhood as important elements in the processes of gender stereotyping. I argue that the production of stereotypes is part of an inter‐discursive contest which has a significant impact on gender relations and women's opportunities. My discussion derives from an anthropological study of one workplace.     

Reformulation of the Nash social welfare function for a continuum of individuals

This paper provides a new formulation of the Nash social welfare function for a continuum of individuals. The new formulation removes redundant assumptions of Kaneko's original formulation and in particular shows that the continuity axiom on social orderings is unnecessary. The derivation of the Nash social welfare function is also much directer and shorter than Kaneko's original derivation.The author thanks a referee of this journal for valuable comments on an eralier draft     

GENDER, CLASS, AND THE ART AND CRAFT OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

Social capital is generally recognized as the positive outcome of sociability and social connection and, more specifically, as the capacity to realize economic benefits through social connections. Limited attention has been paid to understanding the potential of social capital at the intersection of socioeconomic disadvantage. The first part of the article examines assumptions of class and gender in the theoretical literature on social capital. The second part explores the influence of class and gender contexts on social networks among women living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Victoria, Australia. The analysis reveals the ways in which social network assets are conditional on socioeconomic and gender circumstances.     

Assumptions at the philosophical and programmatic levels in evaluation

Stakeholders and evaluators hold a variety of levels of assumptions at the philosophical, methodological, and programmatic levels. The use of a transformative philosophical framework is presented as a way for evaluators to become more aware of the implications of various assumptions made by themselves and program stakeholders. The argument is examined and demonstrated that evaluators who are aware of the assumptions that underlie their evaluation choices are able to provide useful support for stakeholders in the examination of the assumptions they hold with regard to the nature of the problem being addressed, the program designed to solve the problem, and the approach to evaluation that is appropriate in that context. Such an informed approach has the potential for development of more appropriate and culturally responsive programs being implemented in ways that lead to the desired impacts, as well as to lead to evaluation approaches that support effective solutions to intransigent social problems. These arguments are illustrated through examples of evaluations from multiple sectors; additional challenges are also identified.     

‘Men Don't Have Families’: Equality and Motherhood in Technical Employment

Drawing upon evidence collected during a study of female technical professionals in the electronics sector, this paper argues that organizational policies and practices in respect of this group continue to be underpinned by the ‘norm’ of the typical male employee whose family commitments impinge marginally, if at all, on work responsibilities. Women, as actual or potential mothers, continue to be seen as deviants from this norm, whose family commitments are likely to adversely affect work performance or commitment. Not only do these assumptions condition the general treatment of women technical professionals, but they are embodied in those policies and practices designed to facilitate the combination of motherhood and paid work. Both the assumptions around which policies are framed and their implementation in practice reinforce as unproblematic the prevailing domestic division of labour. Such policies and practices therefore continue to function essentially as a concession to the deviant status of women in general and mothers in particular, rather than as tools of a broader equal opportunities policy.     

The Theory That Won't Die: From Mass Society to the Decline of Social Capital

Though it lacks adequate empirical support, the hypothesis of declining social attachments as a source of American social problems persists. Both mass society theory in the mid-twentieth century and the theory of declining social capital in the late-twentieth century have had broad appeal. This paper demonstrates the continuities in argument and assumptions between these two theories as well as the modifications of the theory in the face of cultural change. It suggests that some of the weaknesses in the theory of decreasing social capital can be traced to the assumptions it shares with mass society theory—assumptions rooted in concerns about individualism.     

Finite sensibility and utility functions

According to the concept of finite sensibility an individual utility function has to fulfill Ng's (1975) Convention 1. In this paper we show that relatively weak assumptions already guarantee the existence of a utility function with the desired property and we present a procedure for constructing such a utility function.     

The Tightrope of Normalcy: Homosexuality,Developmental Citizenship,and American Adolescence, 1890–1940

In the early twentieth century, American developmental citizenship presumed a gradual extension of rights based upon a naturalized trajectory that would lead individuals toward heterosexuality, gender complimentarity, and increasing social and political investment. Means changed dramatically through which psychological, pedagogical, and political discourses positioned adolescence, sexuality, and gender in relationship to national belonging. Yet compliance with gender and sexual normativity as a marker of successful adjustment into adulthood persisted as a powerful precondition to full citizenship. Figurative “problem youth” were attacked in part because they threatened to expose exclusionary assumptions undergirding supposedly universal ideals in optimistic modern American democracy.     

Not yet the postcolonial era: The (super) nation-state and transnationalism of cultural studies: Response to Ang and Stratton

Abstract

What is the epistemological and political status of the nation-state in the current practices of Cultural Studies? What is the relationship between the transnationalization of capital/super-states and the transnational turn of Cultural Studies? Through analyzing discursive sites of ‘regionalization’, ‘the Postcolonial’, ‘globalization’, this essay attempts to pinpoint unquestioned assumptions in the critical phase of ‘internationalizing’ Cultural Studies. Unless counter-hegemony positions and strategies can be collectively discussed, argued over and formulated, Cultural Studies as an internationalist project will run the risk of losing its critical edges and even reproducing the existing power structure of the nation-states and global capital. An openended geo-colonial historical materialism is proposed to revitalize Cultural Studies as part of a global decolonization movement.     

The Role of Return Home Welfare Interviews in Responding to the Needs of Young Runaways

When children and young people run away from home or care it is most often indicative of problems in their lives. Reporting on the findings of a recent evaluation, this study considers the role, delivery and impact of ‘return home welfare interviews’ (RHWIs) in identifying children and young people in need. It concludes that RHWIs function as an effective screening mechanism and can be facilitative in creating multiple pathways for referral to appropriate services. It challenges assumptions about the unsuitability of the police in undertaking RHWIs and highlights the importance of context, training and appropriate resourcing to the success of police delivery.     

Socio-economic re-structuring and employment: the case of minority ethnic groups

The consequences of major changes in employment, due to the decline of manufacturing and the growth of the service sector, have not been well-documented, nor theorized, in the sociology of ethnic relations, even in recent studies. For example, Blumer's classic argument that economic development adapts to 'race relations', rather than the reverse as predicted by the modernization school, has not been either empirically resolved or conceptually applied to the UK. By adapting data from the Labour Force Survey and the Census, the paper begins to fill this gap with a detailed account of three main minority ethnic groups, and a separate analysis of male and female employment. It is demonstrated that, contrary to assumptions that members of the minority ethnic groups suffered most from de-industrialization, they actually did rather well, and in some cases did better than the majority population. These findings are re-conceptualized as collective social mobility, as part of a review of a number of conceptual frameworks in the light of the data.     

Being a teacher with a so-called ‘immigrant background’: challenges of dealing with social boundaries

ABSTRACT

There have been calls in many European countries to diversify the teaching staff as a response to increasing diversity within student populations. These calls are often based on underlying assumptions that teachers with a migration history are well placed to act as ‘intercultural mediators’ and ‘role models’ for successful integration. However, these assumptions often lack differentiation. The presented study addresses this lack of differentiation for the case of the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Based on social constructivist theory (Barth; Wimmer) and pursuing a qualitative-hermeneutical approach (Schütze; Rosenthal), the study shows four ideal types of dealing with social boundary dynamics among teachers who have been categorised or labelled in terms of a ‘second immigrant generation’. Additionally, the study provides insight that (a) the category of ‘labour migration’ is experienced as a particularly significant category of boundary making and (b) that schools in urban-immigrant neighbourhoods – in contrast to those in rural-non-immigrant neighbourhoods – are experienced as places with an increased chance of recognition for a teacher ‘with an immigrant background’, although even there, these teachers find themselves in constant engagement to defend their belonging and to justify their sensitivity in dealing with migration-related diversity.