Our Capitalism: Between Oligarchic and Bureaucratic

The socioeconomic structure of Russian society is currently undergoing fundamental changes. It is natural, therefore, that interest in how people relate to their work has increased. This interest is based, in particular, on Max Weberys classic finding that the fundamental socioeconomic changes associated with the emergence of capitalism would not have occurred without the development of a new work ethic. The purpose of the present article is to analyze two types of normative and motivational structures regulating the work activity of the populatioe those determined by society's oficial ideology and those that characterize people's personal attitudes toward the importance of work in general as well as toward its particular aspects.     

Natural Resource Management

Human qualities are one of the most important components of a society's culture, characterizing its stability and potential for reform and, to a considerable extent, determining the well-being of the people themselves. This is a field that has hardly been touched upon as an object of sociological research. Only a few works have focused on this issue: a population's social quality is analyzed as one of the regulators of the social mechanism of the development of the economy [1], emphasizing the qualities of the working person as an element of the economic culture; another work studies the quality of the population of St. Petersburg [2]. Fundamental research is being done by candidate of philosophical sciences G. M. Kochetov, who has compiled a glossary of human qualities and properties comprising about 75,000 terms [3].     

Be Happy Because Your Father Isn't Your Father: An Analysis of Colombian Telenovelas

Critics of mass-mediated culture have long maintained that media such as television, radio, and newspapers are instrumental in propagating class values. In his analysis of Colombian telenovelas, Azriel Bibliowicz argues that this apparently harmless form of entertainment also has a political and ideological base whose implicit messages serve to make its viewers forget reality. Just as Levi Strauss believes that mythsplay a central role in society, Bibliowicz claims that the purpose of myths in telenovelas is to have us lose sight o f the origins of the eristingsocial order and to exonerate the dominant class which controls society's means of production. He gives us an overview of the Colombian television industry, describes how a telenovela is made, and analyzes one-“Manuela”-which contains a social message. Readers will find some interesting similarities and differences between this study of a Colombian popular art form and the articles by Flora and Bonilla de Ramos which focus on the fotonovela and radio in the same country.     

The Nazi rag-pickers and their wine: the politics of waste and recycling in Nazi Germany

This article offers a first attempt to examine systematically the politics of waste and recycling in the Third Reich, one of the first modern states to articulate ‘zero waste’ as a political goal. It presupposes that waste, both in its material realities and its everyday representations, offers a powerful guide to any society's implicit order. With respect to Nazi Germany, the suggestion that such presumably neutral materials as trash, waste and garbage order social relations has particularly sinister implications. Focusing on scrap collectors and salvaging practices inside Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe, this article argues that waste management and recycling were integral to the Nazi racial order and crystallized as central strategies to administer the chaos of war. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers in party, industry and society performed their loyalty and re-imposed order by collecting paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rags and bones with the explicit goal of closing the energy cycle, extending the Reich's resource base and increasing the regime's war-making capabilities. In pursuit of these goals, the Nazi state attempted not only to conquer its many enemies but also to erase the evidence of its own proliferating military setbacks. These efforts notwithstanding, the reclamation of waste did not have the power to reverse the fortunes of war. The Nazi politics of zero waste recycled chaos instead.     

The Role of the Group in Peer Group Entry

This study explored psychological conditions affecting children's receptiveness to a newcomer (the guest) in a peer group entry task. Subjects were 93 host dyads (48 male) of 7- to 9-year-old children. Hosts played a word-naming game for 5 min before being joined by a male or female guest. The hosts' pre-entry interaction was coded to reflect an orientation toward the game (agentic) or toward each other and toward experimental setting demands (communal). Hosts' psychological orientation predicted entry outcomes. Specifically, hosts of excluded children verbally competed with each other (an aspect of agency) more than hosts of children who entered. Male hosts competed more than female hosts and female hosts helped and encouraged each other (aspects of the communal orientation) more than male hosts. These findings suggest that the strategies and effort required by children to achieve group entry may depend on prior psychological conditions attending the interaction of the peer group.     

Protecting the Public's Health in An Era of Bioterrorism: The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act

During the fall of 2001, public health law scholars at the Center for Law and the Public's Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities were asked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a series of national partners to develop the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA). The MSEHPA provides a series of modern powers for states to consider in responding to catastrophic public health emergencies, including bioterrorism events. Since December 2001, provisions based on the MSEHPA have been introduced in nearly 40 states and passed in 20. Underlying the development of the act is a long-standing debate between legal and ethical scholars and law- and policymakers as to the appropriate ways to balance individual and communal rights. The drafting challenge was to create a comprehensive model law that provides adequate powers to protect the public's health while also respecting individual and group rights. The MSEHPA empowers public health agents with broad authority and simultaneously limits the exercise of power in time, duration, and scope to accomplish communal goals of abating serious public health threats. Coercive public health powers, particularly isolation and quarantine, are exercised on a temporary basis, only so long as are reasonably necessary and only among persons who justifiably may pose a risk to others because of their contagious conditions. Individual rights to contest the coercive use of public health powers, even during an emergency, are secured.     

Discounting climate change

In this paper I offer a fairly complete account of the idea of social discount rates as applied to public policy analysis. I show that those rates are neither ethical primitives nor observables as market rates of return on investment, but that they ought instead to be derived from economic forecasts and society's conception of distributive justice concerning the allocation of goods and services across personal identities, time, and events. However, I also show that if future uncertainties are large, the formulation of intergenerational well-being we economists have grown used to could lead to ethical paradoxes even if the uncertainties are thin-tailed. Various modelling avenues that offer a way out of the dilemma are discussed. None is entirely satisfactory.     

The future of adult safeguarding in Australia

Significant reforms to Australia's adult safeguarding laws and practices are in the process of occurring in the context of increasingly market‐oriented social care provision and rising human rights consciousness. Recent safeguarding developments have included federal regulatory reforms concerning disability and aged care service provision, together with significant reform activity stemming from a national inquiry into elder abuse. Despite this national activity, adult safeguarding continues largely to be an arena of state and territory responsibility. This article examines recent reform developments and asks how safeguarding laws and practices can be reformed to take account of increased federal involvement in social care regulation and the more market‐oriented ways in which social care is being provided. The article argues that while state and territory safeguarding laws and practices are unlikely to become uniform, 10 principles ought to guide continued adult safeguarding reform. These principles seek to balance respect for the autonomy of individuals with society's obligation to support those in need.     

Microcredit Self-Help Groups for Widowed and Abandoned Women in South India: Do They Help?

ABSTRACT

Results are presented from a study on a microcredit program with self-help groups implemented for widowed and abandoned women in Tamil Nadu shortly after the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Data were collected from 109 participants measuring the women's investment patterns, loan amounts, demographics, and overall well-being (psychological, economic, communal, and familial). Results indicate that loan amounts and investment patterns were not significantly related to the women's well-being. Length of group participation and having children were negatively related to the women's well-being. These findings are discussed in relation to social and cultural contexts. Suggestions for programs for this population of vulnerable women and other marginalized groups are proposed.     

The good life for children: Do we really care about the trends?

How do we know if Australian children and young people are having a ‘good life‘? What about their lives compared to children and young people in other countries? To answer these questions, the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY) produced a Report Card to compare Australian average, Indigenous Australian average, and international or Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) average for a number of measures of child and youth wellbeing. The ARACY Report Card shows that Australian results are average when compared to other OECD countries in most areas of child and youth wellbeing. Most importantly for nearly all indicators, Indigenous Australian children fare substantially less well than the Australian average and the majority of children in other countries. It is argued that community attitudes and behaviours toward children and young people, and our society's focus on wealth creation, are detrimental to children's and young people's wellbeing. The need for a better balance between economic progress and a socially and environmentally sustainable society is discussed, along with a strategy to better meet the emotional needs of children and young people.     

The Effect of Financial Incentives and Access to Services on Self-funded Admissions to Long-term Care

With the growth in the numbers and proportion of older people in the population the funding and incentive structures around long‐term care are of international concern. A study of the circumstances of self‐funded admissions to care homes allowed the comparison of self‐funders with publicly funded admissions to care homes in the UK, the influences on self‐funders in their decision to move into a care home and resources on which they were able to draw. These findings contribute to our understanding of the impact of current policy on self‐funders and our thinking about the way that future policy and practice changes could improve the way we use society's resources in the provision of long‐term care.     

Results in family casework with feebleminded clients 1

Abstract

The bombing in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 was a massive assault on the meaning‐making of survivors and community members. Utilizing a social constructionist perspective, this article explores the evolution of the community's social narrative as it shifted in the immediate wake of the blast to a new framework for understanding the event three months later. It is speculated that the community's storying of the bombing was initially centered on issues of action and recovery in order to restore civil order. Only after the departure of the Red Cross, which contributed to the formation of this communal narrative, did traditional crisis notions concerning phases of grief begin to appear in the local Oklahoma City newspaper. In addition, individual stories that did not conform to the larger understanding of events were conferred less authority than those in accordance with the dominant narrative.     

Alienation and the Assimilation of Immigrants

The successful adjustment of immigrants is usually considered in terms only of their cultural, sociological and psychological fitting into the receiving society. However, this attachment process is invariably accompanied by estrangement from the old society—a process of alienation. The effects of this alienation may include severe behavioural breakdown. Even some socially approved behaviours may reflect alienation. Focusing on alienation rather than assimilation permits a re-examination of the adjustment of immigrants. It suggests that preservation of elements of the donor society's culture would facilitate this adjustment. This view is, therefore, consistent with a multicultural model of ethnic group interrelationships.     

Sex worker and mother: managing dual and threatened identities

This paper draws on a qualitative study that sought to understand and develop theory based upon 24 women's subjective accounts of their childhood and adult experiences and involvement in sex work in the UK. It specifically examines the management of dual and threatened identities for the 17 women who were also mothers. To ensure the centrality of the women's voices in the analysis and theory generation, a grounded theory approach was taken using a psychosocial framework that drew on concepts of resilience to explore how the meanings of those experiences were reflectively appraised by participants. The findings indicate that there is a need to cope with the threat to identity inherent in society's diametrically opposed perceptions of sex worker and ‘good mother’ and simultaneously to manage the coexistence of the roles and identities of mother and sex worker. What appear significant in determining how these tensions are managed are the accumulated risk factors of early childhood, and the resources available to individuals in adulthood to manage both identities. Services must recognize not only individual but wider environmental and familial factors impacting on women with the dual identity of sex worker and mother in order to promote their resilience as mothers, whether living with or apart from their children.     

Flexible public policy: The case of the United States wheat sector

This paper tests the proposition that flexible policy rules that tie program instrument settings to changes in market conditions can improve economic welfare compared to the prevailing practice in the United States of setting agricultural policy instruments at fixed levels once every 4 years. Flexible policy rules are obtained for the U.S. wheat sector using stochastic control methods. A constraint structure representing producer and consumer behavior and a policy criterion function representing society's weighting of various groups are estimated. It is shown that the flexible policy rules developed in this paper outperform historic policy instrument settings across a wide spectrum of economic conditions.     

Resistance as a means of creating accountability in child welfare institutions

This paper investigates the identity constructions of youths who are objects of special interventions in the area of child welfare. The aim of the paper was to explore the various dimensions of resistance to institutional identities among youths in special schools and foster‐care institutions. Interviews were conducted with adolescents aged between 12 and 15, identified as having social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. The analysis generates knowledge about society's interventions as well as how adolescents respond to offered institutional identities by adopting different kinds of discursive resistance. The paper highlights the different types of discursive resistance that adolescents use to present themselves as accountable individuals and discusses the importance of considering resistance as a positive force rather than as something that must be defeated.     

Special Needs,Relationship Type and Distributive Justice Norms in Early and Later Years of Middle Childhood

Sensitivity to relationship type and level of need in distributing rewards for work done was investigated with classmates who were best friends, acquaintances, or children with special educational needs (SEN). Children (N = 142) aged 8–11 years completed measures of reward allocation, monitoring of task inputs and belief in a just world (BJW). An increase in children's sensitivity to relationship type and need was found with age in reward allocation and monitoring of task inputs. Among older children, BJW varied with relationship type and monitoring of task inputs. Findings support the characterization of relationships with acquaintances as exchange relationships, with best friends as symmetrical communal relationships, and with children who have SEN as asymmetrical communal relationships.     

Tension and Extension: Thoughts on Scottish Surnames and Medieval Popular Culture

The answer to the question “What's in a name?” is plenty, according to W.F.H. Nicolaisen in his essay on Scottish surnames and what they can tell us of medieval popular culture. Place names, for example, often provide information about prehistoric strata and come to be equivalent in significance to material items which provide archeological insight into cultures. Surnames, when tied to place names, can give us information on migrations, while other types of names reveal occupational histories. and patterns of kinship. The very act of naming has both communal and personal importance and can yield significant socio-cultural data.     

The coupling of rural communities with their economic base: agriculture,localism and the discourse of self-sufficiency

In the context of the changing socio-economic position of agriculture, this paper is concerned with the governmental relations associated with managing the decoupling of society from economy and the ensuing question about how the economic base can be adequately utilised to ensure continued material sustenance for the community. Central to these challenges is the role of social policy in co-ordinating processes of change against society's capacity for change, taking into account the increasing realisation that the both the capacity of the planet and its economies are finite. Localism is increasingly being promoted as a key social strategy which communities can use to address their needs to secure material sustenance. Under this form of localism, communities are required to secure their own socio-economic sustainability by taking an entrepreneurial approach to developing their local assets and resources. Societies are facing questions about the viability of both interventionist and market-based approaches for ensuring the continued sustenance of given communities. But, since localism does not have the capacity effectively to deal with the question of the carrying capacity of the economic or environmental base at a societal level, one must query the extent to which faith can be maintained in localism as an effective strategy for the future.