It's Not Whether You Win or Lose,It's How You Place the Blame: Shifting Perceptions of Recreancy in the Context of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

A key theoretical concept in the study of technological disasters is “recreancy,” which refers to perception that institutional actors have failed to carry out their responsibilities in a manner that engenders societal trust. Using household survey data from the Community Oil Spill Survey (COSS) to assess recreancy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we analyze four waves of the COSS collected between 2010 and 2013 to explore respondents’ perceptions of blame and distrust in relation to key institutional actors associated with the disaster, paying special attention to the influence of time and employment in natural resource occupations. We show that BP is clearly viewed as the principal responsible party at fault for the disaster and that the odds of blaming BP and the federal government have held relatively steady over time, while the odds of blaming state government increased over time. We find high levels of distrust of BP and the federal government, but show that odds of being distrustful of both institutional actors was significantly lower three years after the spill. Fishing households were significantly more likely to blame and be distrustful of institutional actors, a finding that is strongly consistent with theoretical expectations.     

Online strategic communication: A cross-cultural analysis of U.S. and Chinese corporate websites

This study applied a cultural divergence approach to examine online marketing interactivity and corporate public image on corporate websites. It analyzed different online strategic communication of corporate websites from two different nations—the United States and China. Results indicated that U.S. corporations were more likely to highlight online marketing interactivity and social responsibility, which integrated marketing and public relations as their online communication strategy. Chinese corporations provided more online spaces for the consumer–consumer interactions and emphasized corporation-oriented information.     

Does Institutional Trust Increase Willingness to Pay More Taxes to Support the Welfare State?

We evaluate the effect of institutional trust on the willingness to pay more taxes to support the welfare state. We found a positive effect of institutional trust on the willingness to pay more taxes to support the welfare state irrespective of the empirical approach used. Our instrumental variable analysis shows that causality run from institutional trust to welfare state support. A one-unit increase in institutional trust leads to a 15 percentage point increase in the willingness to pay more taxes to help the needy. Similarly, a one-unit increase in institutional trust leads to a 16 percentage point increase in the willingness to pay more taxes to support public health care and education. Consequently, institutional trust should be viewed as one of the most important mechanisms that protect the welfare state from dismantling and retrenchment. We also found a stronger effect of support for more universal programs such as public health care and education than for helping the needy.     

Blood donation and institutional trust: risk, policy rhetoric, and the men who have sex with men lifetime deferral policy in Canada

This article examines the process of rebuilding institutional trust in the Canadian blood system in the aftermath of the tainted blood scandal. Our focus is the policy of lifetime deferral from donating blood for men who have sex with men. Drawing on findings from interviews with representatives of Health Canada's Expert Advisory Committee on Blood Regulation, the National Liaison Committee, Canadian Blood Services, and blood consumer groups, we demonstrate how claims making about rights, discrimination, science, and risk contribute to policy continuity. We also examine the link between policy continuity and the management of reputational risk.     

Divining Value with Relational Proxies: How Moneylenders Balance Risk and Trust in the Quest for Good Borrowers1

This analysis of the U.S. credit industry explores how lenders evaluate people during the loan application process. They use a variety of risk‐assessment techniques in conjunction with trust‐building mechanisms that I call relational proxies. The relational proxies that lenders rely on are behavioral impressions, reputation information, and financial narratives that explain information on credit reports. Lenders use this subjectively evaluated trust assessment interdependently with standardized financial information to enhance their decision‐making process. Face‐to‐face evaluation of potential borrowers is mediated by institutional rules meant to reduce the need for trust. However, for the lenders in this study, a good borrower is always a trustworthy borrower.     

Trust,commitment and team working: the paradox of virtual organizations

Abstract In this article we take an agent‐centred approach to explore the role of trust and commitment in the virtual organization. The findings of a case study in an international information technology consultancy indicate that multiple relationships arising from the alliance‐based structure require clear commitment to enable the development of trust as a basis for longer‐term partnership. Paradoxically, the perceived low level of commitment from the organization does not engender the high level of trust and commitment required from virtual teams to maximize their performance. However, over time and with extended exchanges, the commitment level and form may evolve, thus necessitating a realignment of existing psychological understanding and trust between the actors. If there is general agreement that an upward shift from short‐term to long‐term commitment is beneficial to all, then the virtual arrangement will continue to be effective.     

What Drives Progressive Policy? Institutional Politics,Political Mediation,Policy Feedbacks,and Early U.S. Old‐Age Policy

What drives progressive public policy? Because progressive policy challenges the interests of powerful people and interests that dominate policy making, it is puzzling that progressive policy ever happens. This article addresses this question by modeling and appraising institutional political, political mediation, and policy feedback theories and models of progressive policy making. Institutional political theory focuses on political institutional conditions, bureaucratic development, election results, and public opinion. Political mediation theory holds that social movements can have influence over progressive policy under favorable political conditions. Policy feedback theory holds that programs will be self‐reinforcing under certain conditions. The article goes beyond previous research by including and analyzing public opinion in institutional political and political mediation models and addressing positive policy feedbacks. We appraise five models derived from these three theories through fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses of the generosity of early old‐age policy across U.S. states at two key moments. We find some support for each theory, and the results suggest that they are complementary. Left regimes or social movements can initiate progressive policy, which can be reinforced for the long term through positive policy feedback mechanisms. We discuss the implications for current U.S. politics and for progressive policy elsewhere.     

“Building a Bigger Table”: Mobilizing Social Capital to Develop a Community Food Resource Center

Traditional food initiatives often aim to increase food access through market-based, needs-driven models, leaving basic food requirements unmet for many in the current U.S. food system. Employing qualitative community-based participatory methods, we examine the asset-based developmental stages of a local-level Food and Resource Center (FRC) in rural Stillwater, OK. We consider the ways that social capital can be activated as a community asset for development, articulating how social networks are used to identify, mobilize, and galvanize community support. How has the community identified and mobilized a “stock” of social capital to employ an asset-based approach to developing a food resource center? How can the FRC enhance social capital for the community as a whole? We provide insight into how individual, agency, and institutional actors act as pivotal resources for community development, delineating the ways in which community social capital and asset-based development can influence an organization's operational goals. Additionally, we explore strategies used to enhance linking and bonding forms of social capital as well as obstacles to bridging social capital in the broader community.     

Beyond Organic and Fair Trade? An Analysis of Ecolabel Preferences in the United States

The success of alternative food initiatives indicates increasing interest in changing the way food is produced, processed, and sold. Ecolabels such as organic and Fair Trade have entered the mainstream marketplace, and other voluntary identifiers on products are emerging to address criteria not included in these successful initiatives. Little is known about consumer interests in these criteria, however. To anticipate the direction of food‐system changes, as well as assist food producers to meet consumer demands, we conducted a national mail survey to assess preferences for criteria that go “beyond” (or could complement) organic and Fair Trade. We utilized a forced‐choice paired‐comparisons question format to rank five possibilities (humane, local, living wage, small‐scale, U.S. grown) that might feasibly be implemented by food producers. Local was the most popular choice, although humane also received a high level of support. Multilevel logistic regression indicated that local was preferred by rural residents, and that humane was preferred by frequent organic consumers and high‐income households. Survey respondents also chose product labels more frequently than other potential sources of information about their food. Preferences for local and humane ecolabel criteria should be placed in perspective, as consumers expressed much higher levels of interest in the more individualized concerns of safety and nutrition. The results suggest, however, that consumers are interested in a food system that addresses broader political and ethical values, which has implications for production, marketing, and movement building for sustainable food systems.     

The justifications for terminating parental rights and adoption in the United States

This article examines the normative basis for prioritizing adoption in the “Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997” (ASFA) as expressed by legislators and public witnesses in congressional hearings. By examining six congressional hearings in the period that led to the ASFA, the article provides new insights to understand how adoption is justified in the U.S. not only as an acceptable form of public intervention but also as an actively promoted and preferred approach when reunification is not possible. The article uses a discourse theoretical framework based on Habermas that distinguishes pragmatic, ethical–political, moral, and legal arguments. It reveals that U.S. federal adoption policy is based on three pillars. Pragmatic risk-oriented thinking forms the central knowledge base to inform policy. Parent responsibility ethics stresses individual responsibility for rehabilitation, with secondary support from the welfare system. Child refamilialization ethics emphasizes decisive and authoritative action to protect the child's needs for safety and permanence.     

Collisions Between Institutional and Populist Risk Imaginaries: The “Dark Side” of Negative Asymmetric Thinking

Expert knowledge informs the construction of public problems from gun violence to disease epidemics to climate change, and institutional actors draw on this knowledge to implement public policy to mitigate or repair the related harms. The expanding role of experts and institutions in managing risks has come at a time of declining public trust in institutions and a legitimacy crisis around expert knowledge. What happens when these tendencies collide? Previous scholarship has examined how disaster arises through failures of foresight, and how cultural‐cognitive biases can prevent actors from seeing disasters coming. Less is known about the mobilization of resistance against risk management policies. This theoretical essay examines a particular category of that resistance: conspiracist discourse that frames risk as emanating primarily from perceived secret agendas of institutions and experts that explicitly claim to be acting in the public interest. This essay argues that conspiracy thinking can be best understood as rooted in a “populist risk imaginary,” which is rooted in negative asymmetry, a cultural‐cognitive bias that foregrounds the possibility of worst‐case outcomes. Conspiracy discourse can be understood as the “dark side” of negative asymmetry, which is otherwise used by service‐oriented professionals to sharpen their foresight in preempting future dangers.     

The origins and consequences of public trust in government: a time series analysis

The study of citizens' trust in the national government has been primarily individual-level, cross-sectional analysis. In the current research, we develop a quarterly time series measure of trust in the U.S. national government from 1980 to 1997 and conduct the first multivariate time series examination of public trust in government. We find that negative perceptions of the economy, scandals associated with Congress, and increasing public concern about crime each lead to declining public trust in government. Declining trust in government in turn leads to less positive evaluations of Congress and reduced support for government action to address a range of domestic policy concerns. These results provide new evidence of the influence of public concern about crime and the centrality of Congress in understanding public evaluations of the national government and new evidence of how declining levels of trust in government may influence elections and domestic policy making.     

Campus Sex in Context: Organizational Cultures and Women's Engagement in Sexual Relationships on Two American College Campuses

An “inhabited” approach to the study of institutions examines how organizational actors produce locally distinctive meaning in response to similar institutional forces. Adopting inhabited institutionalism to the study of campus sexual life, this study draws on interviews with 54 undergraduate women at two four‐year universities in the United States—Ivy U and State U—to show campus cultures unique to a university inform women's decisions to engage in hookups and/or relationships. For women attending Ivy U, an elite institution where pressure to succeed is palpable, both hookups and long‐distance relationships alike are posited as advantageous for the time‐crunched, preprofessional student. At State U, a public school with a party reputation, women explain their engagement in hookups as part of the “fun” of college life, while women seeking or involved in committed relationships are obligated to negotiate the effects of the party culture in their partnerships. This study challenges the notion of a monolithic sexual culture across university settings by showing how campus cultures cultivated at the local level create unique organizational conditions within which undergraduate women forge and explain their engagement in hookups and relationships alike.     

Bringing the “Moral Charge” Home: Fair Trade within the North and within the South*

Abstract Fair trade is typically understood as an alternative market system that aims to right historically inequitable terms of trade between the geopolitical North and South and foster more direct producer/consumer linkages. We suggest that a more expansive application of the term “fair trade” to encompass agro‐food initiatives within the North and South has considerable analytic and practical utility. We profile five such initiatives in the United States and two in Mexico. The U.S. undertakings are best understood as “proto‐” fair trade projects that frame their work principally as an effort to preserve “family farming” rather than as an exercise to achieve fairness in the marketplace. The Mexican initiatives more explicitly embrace the certification‐criteria‐labeling model of international fair trade. Both, we conclude, hold potential to harness fair trade's “moral charge” to improve conditions for small producers and laborers in North and South experiencing most directly the negative effects of economic globalization.     

Innovations to Make Markets More Inclusive for the Poor

Market failures, government failures and some of the characteristics of both the poor and business actors as well as their environment can act as barriers preventing the poor from participating more actively in markets, both as consumers and as producers. Private actors ‐ including for‐profit and not‐for‐profit entities, often in partnership with the public sector ‐ have been able to mitigate some of these constraints through innovations that have helped to make markets more inclusive for the poor, enabling them not just to gain access, but also to participate in ways that enhance their economic empowerment and human development. This article identifies the strategies and innovations used and devises a possible typology for them.     

THE IMPACT OF A PUBLIC OPTION IN THE U.S. HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET

We develop a game‐theoretical framework to examine the implications of the introduction of a nonprofit “public option” in the U.S. health insurance market. In this model, heterogeneous consumers have to choose between two competing insurance plans. One plan is offered by a profit‐maximizing private insurer; the other by social‐welfare‐maximizing public option. In equilibrium, the distinct objectives of the two insurers induce adverse selection in consumer choice: the public option covers the less healthy consumers, yielding the more profitable segment of market to the private insurer. However, our empirical results suggest that both insurers will capture significant parts of the health insurance market. (JEL I11, L10, L21, L32)     

Accessibility and clarity of state child welfare agency mission statements

The authors reviewed 40 mission statements guiding U.S. public child welfare practice for accessibility, clarity, and values. Nine of the 40 state-administered child welfare agencies had not posted their missions on the Web as of October 2002, and 30 mission statements required a 12th-grade or college reading level for easy comprehension. The mission statements most often expressed the goals, values, and processes of safety, permanence, well-being, family preservation, cultural competence, self-sufficiency, and partnership. Mission statements can be an important tool for improving child welfare outcomes by providing direction; therefore, agency administrators should consider how clear and accessible their state agency mission statements are.     

Why Swedes Trust the State and Scots Do Not: An Exploration of the Diverse Protestant Roots of Modern Welfare Systems

This paper explores how the Protestant traditions of Calvinist Presbyterianism and Lutheranism have shaped church-state relations differently in Scotland and Sweden, resulting in different understandings of the role of the state and civil society in public welfare. It finds that high levels of public trust in the state's authority and state intervention in Sweden can be traced back to Lutheran doctrine and institutionally close links between the Swedish Church and the state, while in Scotland trusting independent civil society and its responsibility for welfare reflects the distance of the Presbyterian Scottish Kirk from the state both in theological and institutional terms.     

Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists

The terms terror, terrorism, and terrorist do not identify causally coherent and distinct social phenomena but strategies that recur across a wide variety of actors and political situations. Social scientists who reify the terms confuse themselves and render a disservice to public discussion. The U.S. government's own catalogs of terrorist events actually support both claims .     

Moral responsibilities of trustees: some first thoughts

The role of a trustee is unclear to most people, including many trustees. The author proposes a view of trustees as persons who have public responsibility for private or independent provision of a public good. This is a moral definition of trusteeship; without trusteeship a pluralist society would be in trouble. The author argues that trustees should be constrained by fiduciary duties, the common good, an interpretative responsibility, and some procedural norms.