Online posting anxiety: impacts on blogging

This study investigates what influences the blog-maintenance intentions of American and Chinese bloggers. Specifically, the current study investigates the role of online posting anxiety and its determinants. Based on social cognitive theory (SCT), this study suggests that bloggers experience anxiety because of their low blogging self-efficacy, negative outcome expectations, and the specific characteristics of blogs. To investigate this hypothesis, in-depth interviews were conducted to examine the nature of online posting anxiety among American and Chinese bloggers. Ten American and 16 Chinese bloggers were interviewed online about their beliefs pertaining to blogging self-efficacy, negative outcome expectations, and online posting anxiety. The current research therefore makes a unique and original contribution, in that this research applies social cognitive concepts to explain online posting anxiety in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) domain.     

Young people as global citizens: negotiation of youth civic participation in adult-managed online spaces

With the proliferation of new media technologies, online spaces for civic engagement are being used as new sites by the young people for enacting global citizenship. Some of these online civic spaces are managed by parent organizations and guide the participants towards accomplishing goals that align with the institutional policies. We use Stuart Hall’s theoretical framework to ground the two methods we used for empirical research- textual analysis of the selected online spaces and in-depth interviews with young bloggers. Our analysis shows how negotiated reading of the encoded messages on the online platforms for youth civic engagement marks a political moment of signification in which there lies a possibility of challenging the dominance of the adult centered notions of civic engagement. Shelat’s online civic culture framework [2014. “Citizens, Global Civic Engagement on Online Platforms: Women as Transcultural Citizens.” Dissertation] helped us examine how these managed platforms encode global citizenship with pre-designed participatory practices that reinforce the hegemonic definition of youth political participation. Interviews of young bloggers on two online global spaces foreground the process of negotiation with the dominant definitions and the use of decoding strategies to create scope for subjective, more local definitions, as well as practices of civic engagement and global citizenship. Though literature suggests that adult-management of online youth spaces perpetuate a gap between the adult-centric notions of participation and the youth oriented ideas of civic engagement, our study reveals that the young participants find ways of articulating their ideas and enter these spaces with plans on how to fulfill their civic goals.     

The Role of School Contexts in Adolescents' Weight‐loss Behaviors and Self‐perceptions of Overweight

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and multilevel modeling, this study investigates the role high school social contexts play in the development of adolescents' weight‐loss behaviors and overweight self‐perceptions. Overall, the results indicate that there is an important association between adolescents' weight‐loss behaviors and self‐perceptions of overweight and the weight‐related context of their school. For example, both adolescent boys and girls are less likely to engage in weight‐loss behaviors when overweight is prevalent among their same‐sex schoolmates. However, gender differences are also found. For example, while adolescent boys' self‐perceptions of overweight are significantly associated with their same‐sex schoolmates' characteristics and behaviors, this is not the case for adolescent girls. Overall, these findings suggest that meso‐level social contexts—such as schools—may be particularly important to how individuals incorporate macro‐level beliefs or values—such as gendered body ideals—into their own behaviors and self‐concepts.     

Can Social Media Use Produce Enduring Social Ties? Affordances and the Case of Katrina Bloggers

Can previously unacquainted, grieving individuals who use social media to organize and participate in decentralized mobilizations build strong, lasting social ties? If so, how? What is it about particular social media technologies and platforms that might explain the strength and longevity of their social ties? Drawing on a case study of New Orleans bloggers who took part in a variety of contentious and non-contentious mobilizations after hurricane Katrina, we find that people who mobilize through social media like blogs can form strong and lasting social ties. We argue that this is partly because of the types of communication and interaction that blogs afford. We identify two types of affordances, mechanical and cultural, as distinct qualities of social media like blogs, and illustrate how they enable the building of strong, digitally mediated social ties among grieving people.     

The role of reciprocation in social network formation,with an application to LiveJournal

This paper deals with the role of reciprocation in the formation of individuals’ social networks. We follow the activity of a panel of bloggers over more than a year and investigate the extent to which initiating a relation brings about its reciprocation. We adapt a standard capital investment model to study how reciprocation affects the build-up of the individual social capital of bloggers, as measured by their links and interactions with others. This allows us to measure the role of content production and relationship building in the dynamics of online social networks and to distinguish between the social networking and media aspects of blogging.     

The Effect of Question Framing and Response Options on the Relationship between Racial Attitudes and Beliefs about Genes as Causes of Behavior

Prior research suggests that the attribution of individual and group differences to genetic causes is correlated with prejudiced attitudes toward minority groups. Our study suggests that these findings may be due to the wording of the questions and to the choice of response options. Using a series of vignettes in an online survey, we find a relationship between racial attitudes and genetic attributions when respondents are asked to make causal attributions of differences between racial groups. However, when they are asked to make causal attributions for characteristics shown by individuals, no such relationship is found. The response scale used appears to make less, if any, difference in the results. These findings indicate that the way questions about genetic causation of behavior are framed makes a significant contribution to the answers obtained because it significantly changes the meaning of the questions. We argue that such framing needs to be carefully attended to, not only in posing research questions but also in discourse about genetics more generally.     

In the path of heroes: second-generation Tamil-Canadians after the LTTE

This paper explores how second-generation Tamil-Canadian university students have modified their ‘cultural heritage’ in the period after the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. Using a generational framework suggested by the work of Karl Mannheim, I show that the events of May 2009 situated second-generation Tamil-Canadian political activism as a response to the ambivalence of their parents to the conflict in Sri Lanka. Second-generation Tamil-Canadians are also shown to have altered the key LTTE symbol of the Maaveerar (great hero) to better fit a transnational social field that is framed by the new realities of post-LTTE Sri Lanka and by intolerance to imported conflict in Canada. I argue that the Tamil second generation is highly engaged with the politics of their cultural identity, and that this engagement may have a lasting influence on transnational Tamil identity and on the political status of the Tamil community within Canada.     

Defending Motherhood: Morality,Responsibility, and Double Binds in Feeding Children

The ideology of intensive mothering sets a high bar and is framed against the specter of the “bad” mother. Poor mothers and mothers of color are especially at risk of being labeled bad mothers. Drawing on 138 in‐depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this study analyzes the discursive and interpersonal strategies poor mothers use to make sense of and defend their feeding and children's body sizes. Food beliefs and practices reflect and reinforce social inequalities and thus represent an exemplary case in which to examine intensive mothering, its ties to growing inequality, and how individuals are called to account for it. Findings demonstrate intersecting inequalities, meanings, and contradictions in mothers' accounts of meeting intensive mothering expectations around feeding, health, and weight. In light of moral framings around feeding and weight, mothers' experiences of surveillance, and the double binds they encounter in feeding children, mothers practice what the authors term defensive mothering.     

Protein needs of older adults engaged in resistance training: a review

Protein recommendations by some professional organizations for young adults engaged in resistance training (RT) are higher than the recommended dietary allowance (RDA), but recommendations for resistance-training older adults (>50 years old) are not well characterized. Some argue that the current RDA is adequate, but others indicate increased protein needs. Although concerns have been raised about the consequences of high protein intake, protein intake above the RDA in older adults is associated with increased bone-mineral density when calcium intake is adequate and does not appear to compromise renal health in older individuals with normal renal function. Individual protein needs for older adults in RT are likely highly variable according to health and training regimen, but an intake of 1.0-1.3 g x kg(-1) x day(-1) should adequately and safely meet the needs of older adults engaged in RT, provided that their energy needs are met.     

Fat in the Fire? Science,the News Media,and the “Obesity Epidemic”2

In recent years, the “obesity epidemic” has emerged as a putative public health crisis. This article examines the interconnected role of medical science and news reporting in shaping the way obesity is framed as a social problem. Drawing on a sample of scientific publications on weight and health, and press releases and news reporting on these publications, we compare and contrast social problem frames in medical science and news reporting. We find substantial overlap in science and news reporting, but the news media do dramatize more than the studies on which they are reporting and are more likely than the original science to highlight individual blame for weight. This is partly due to the news media’s tendency to report more heavily on the most alarmist and individual‐blaming scientific studies. We find some evidence that press releases also shape which articles receive media coverage and how they are framed.     

Transnational-Migrant Domestic Workers' Cultural Activism Online: The Case of an Indonesian Islamic-Writing Group in Hong Kong

This study aims to illustrate the nuanced efficacy of Islamic-writing activism by Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, who vigorously utilize online spheres. We regard this group as a part of transnational migrant domestic workers' cultural activism, which is currently flourishing in the region. In particular, we pay a special attention to this group's intersectional themes in Islam and writing, to ask how an intersectional activist group utilizes online terrains and multiple themes, to nurture affective ties with others and simultaneously build activist networks. By combining questionnaires, socio-metric surveys, interviews and web content analysis, we argue that the participation in this activism allows the members collective and personal empowerment online. From the data analyses, we uncover three key features of the members' Facebook usage: maintaining weak ties by balancing multiple group memberships, using tools for interactive self-identification, and being driven by networking. Additionally, the members re-contextualized their gender and class identities in positive ways, using Islam and writing. We argue that the members utilized Islam chiefly as moral yardstick and image-making, while writing as a multitasking tool and an alternative class marker for them.Through these acts of re-contextualization, the members recreate their alternative self-identifications incorporating class, religion, gender and nationality seamlessly. These features partly resonate with their offline behaviors, to assist and synthesize their attempt at self-actualization in-between their cultural spaces, by integrating the host society, native society, and the activist society.     

Beyond privacy: bodily integrity as an alternative framework for understanding non-consensual pornography

ABSTRACT

Activists and legal scholars seeking remedies to non-consensual pornography (known colloquially as ‘revenge porn’) have generally framed it as a violation of privacy; however, the concept of privacy a fraught history, linked to women’s exclusion from the public sphere, denial of their sexual expression, and impunity for abusers. I argue that the concept of body integrity better maps onto the experiences described by victims, who seldom distinguish between digital representations of their body and the body itself and who often liken non-consensual pornography to sexual assault. However, a feminist approach to bodily integrity (rather than one rooted in classical liberalism) is require in order to account for the disproportionately negative consequences non-consensual pornography has for women.     

Segregation and protectionism: Institutionalised views of Aboriginal rurality

Rurality is a complex and contested term, with multiple notions and gazes amid calls for theoretical pluralism. In Australia, the spatial categories of ‘remote’, ‘rural’, ‘regional’ and ‘urban’ are applied to places that vary in their distance from an economic and political core and have differing population densities. We argue that natural resources institutions in rural Australia demand an ‘authentic’ performance of Aboriginality that is framed within orthodox and stable constructions of an Indigeneity associated with the remote category. Dominant representations of remote Aboriginal people living on traditional homelands and engaged in ‘traditional’ environmental protection are assumed to hold for all places and transposed when natural resources institutions satisfy compulsory Indigenous engagement. Such institutional requirements for authenticity exclude alternative and multiple Indigenous voices in natural resources management. Rather, Aboriginal people seek engagement across a portfolio of natural resources activities typically found in rural areas (such as mining, grazing, forestry, water allocation planning, and natural resources service delivery and enterprise development), and not just isolated in natural and cultural heritage conservation. This broad participation would more completely match their expressed aspirations and the multiple lived realities of their fluid and networked rural worlds. Using the rural town of Eidsvold in Australia as a case study, we discuss the findings of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Indigenous people at regional natural resources management meetings and at ‘home’ in Eidsvold. Rather than a generic institutional approach, a place-based approach to understanding the complex ruralities of Aboriginal people is needed.     

Foucault and the politics of critical management studies

This paper explores the different ways in which we read Foucault in management and organisation studies but, more particularly, some of the features of his project that we seem often to exclude. In the context of a growing interest in more ‘engaged’ forms of scholarly practice among management academics, we argue that further consideration of Foucault might have something more to offer. Setting the main arguments in context, we suggest an outline of the dominant ways in which we read Foucault: the identities we assign to him. Hence we know Foucault primarily as a social theorist, genealogist, neo‐Weberian, and postmodernist. We then consider some of the engaged aspects of his project, focusing on his emergence as an activist intellectual in the 1970s. Possible implications for critical management scholars are then considered.     

Searching for a Narrative of Loss: Interactional Ordering of Ambiguous Grief

In this article I analyze the collective management of ambiguous emotions in the case of grief arising from perinatal loss/stillbirth. Based on a content analysis of selected Polish discussion lists for bereaved parents and interviews with moderators of these lists, I conceptualize the experience of grief arising from miscarriage/stillbirth as both culturally “disembedded”—not regulated by a coherent set of feeling and display rules, and interactionally “disenfranchised”—framed by the immediate social surrounding of the bereaved as illegitimate. This study then focuses on subsequent social processes surrounding the collective management of such emotions through interactions within online bereavement communities, leading to the creation of local definitions of the situation of loss and formation of subcultural feeling and display rules of grief. I posit that in a wider perspective these community processes can be seen as grassroots mechanisms that agents use to transform the existing emotional culture of grief.     

Analysing the effect of public health campaigns on reducing excess weight: a modelling approach for the Spanish Autonomous Region of the Community of Valencia

Excess weight is fast becoming a serious health concern in the developed and developing world. The concern of the public health sector has lead to the development of public health campaigns, focusing on two-fold goals: to inform the public as to the health risks inherent in being overweight, and the benefits of a change in nutritional behaviour. Recent studies indicate that the effects of the average public health campaign on the target community is around 5%. In this study we aim to quantify the effect of different public health campaigns on lifestyle behaviour in the target populations in order to bring about weightloss in a significant number of people over the next few years.This study is based on recent works that consider excess weight as a consequence of the transmission of unhealthy lifestyles from one individual to another. Following this point of view, first a mathematical model is presented. Then, policies based on public health campaigns addressed to stop people gaining weight (prevention; this type of policy acts on individuals in order to maintain their weight and to stop an increase in weight) and, policies addressed to overweight individuals to reduce their weight (treatment; these campaigns act on overweight and/or obese individuals in order to reduce their weight) are simulated in order to evaluate their effectiveness. The study concludes that combination of preventive plus treatment campaigns are more effective than considering them separately.     

‘Your Mind is the Battlefield’: South African Trainee Health Workers Engage with the Past

A key problematic in any post‐conflict society is how to account for the injustices of the past, while at the same time making a space for the development of a shared future. In South Africa, there is an increasing demand for health and social service workers, who are required to address the impact of an unjust past upon individuals and communities. Educators of health and social service workers are thus faced with the complexities of finding pedagogical practices that would allow students to recognize these past injustices and their impact on present problems. This article looks at data taken from a teaching project across two South African universities, where students from three professions engaged in online discussions about their personal, social and future professional identities. During some of these discussions, students spontaneously entered into disagreements about the relevance or irrelevance of the past in modern‐day South Africa. The data indicates considerable reluctance on the part of some students to talk about the past and its relevance to the present. The authors suggest that while talking about the past is both difficult and potentially painful for students, it is nevertheless the responsibility of educators to facilitate such discussions among trainee professionals.     

Anorexia nervosa in males: A case report and review of the literature

Only 5–10% of the diagnosed cases of anorexia nervosa occur in males. Anorexia nervosa can be difficult to identify in males because it may occur in a different subset of the population as compared to females and because anorectic males use different terms to express conflicts regarding body size and shape than their female counterparts. This case study illustrates how a young prepubescent male responded to traumatic events in his life by developing anorexia nervosa with an eventual loss of 33% of his premorbid weight. Precipitants of this patient's illness were his parent's divorce, his mother's remarriage, a precipitous relocation, his mother's pregnancy, and his sister's development of a life-threatening disease, all occurring during the early stages of puberty. The study concludes that anorexia nervosa in young males can result from multiple psychologically traumatic events which occur at a particular stage of development.     

China as janus: the framing of china by british columbia’s alternative public sphere

In recent years, Canada–China relations have drawn extensive public attention in Canada. To better understand this trend, this article examines the coverage of China in the “alternative public sphere” of British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province. Based on the qualitative critical discourse analysis of China-related online media generated by four alternative media and advocacy sources (the Tyee, the Dogwood Initiative, the David Suzuki Foundation, and the Pembina Institute), we argue that China’s image within British Columbia’s alternative public sphere is characterized by the tension between two conflicting images. On one hand, China has been framed as a powerful, foreign entity that unduly influences Canada’s economic policies and decisions on energy infrastructure. On the other hand, China has been framed positively as a global leader in renewable energy and, increasingly, in global climate negotiations. Although both images of China were found in the data analysis, the negative image was significantly more prominent than the positive one.     

Risking safety and rights: online sex work,crimes and ‘blended safety repertoires’

It has been well established that those working in the sex industry are at various risks of violence and crime depending on where they sell sex and the environments in which they work. What sociological research has failed to address is how crime and safety have been affected by the dynamic changing nature of sex work given the dominance of the internet and digital technologies, including the development of new markets such as webcamming. This paper reports the most comprehensive findings on the internet‐based sex market in the UK demonstrating types of crimes experienced by internet‐based sex workers and the strategies of risk management that sex workers adopt, building on our article in the British Journal of Sociology in 2007. We present the concept of ‘blended safety repertoires’ to explain how sex workers, particularly independent escorts, are using a range of traditional techniques alongside digitally enabled strategies to keep themselves safe. We contribute a deeper understanding of why sex workers who work indoors rarely report crimes to the police, reflecting the dilemmas experienced. Our findings highlight how legal and policy changes which seek to ban online adult services advertising and sex work related content within online spaces would have direct impact on the safety strategies online sex workers employ and would further undermine their safety. These findings occur in a context where aspects of sex work are quasi‐criminalized through the brothel keeping legislation. We conclude that the legal and policy failure to recognize sex work as a form of employment, contributes to the stigmatization of sex work and prevents individuals working together. Current UK policy disallows a framework for employment laws and health and safety standards to regulate sex work, leaving sex workers in the shadow economy, their safety at risk in a quasi‐legal system. In light of the strong evidence that the internet makes sex work safer, we argue that decriminalisation as a rights based model of regulation is most appropriate.