Successful societies: Decision-making and the quality of attentiveness

Combining moral philosophy with sociological theory to build on themes introduced in Hall and Lamont’s Successful Societies (2009), the paper outlines a distinctive perspective. It holds that a necessary condition of successful societies is that decision-makers base their decisions on a high level of attentiveness (concern and comprehension) towards subjectively valued and morally legitimate forms of life. Late modern societies consist of a plurality of forms of life, each providing grounds for what Alasdair MacIntyre has called internal goods—valued and morally valuable practices. The status of such goods is examined, and distinctions are drawn between their manifest and latent, and transposable and situationally specific, characteristics. We integrate this refined idea of internal goods into a developed conception of habitus that is both morally informed and situationally embedded. The sociological approach of strong structuration theory (SST) is employed to demonstrate how this conception of habitus can guide the critique of decision-making that damages internal goods. We identify the most pervasive and invidious forms of damaging decision-making in contemporary societies as those involving excessive forms of instrumental reasoning. We argue that our developed conception of habitus, anchored in the collectively valued practices of specific worlds, can be a powerful focus for resistance. Accounts of scholarship in higher education and of the white working class in America illustrate the specificities of singular, particular, social worlds and illuminate critical challenges raised by the perspective we advocate.     

A comparison of three maximum likelihood models for stage-frequency data

Summary A comparison has been made between the estimates obtained from maximum likelihood estimation of gamma, inverse normal, and normal distribution models for stage-frequency data. Results have been compared for six of sets of test data, and from many sets of simulated data. It is concluded that (1) some estimates may differ substantially between the models, (2) estimates from the correct model have little bias, and estimated standard errors are generally close to theoretical values, (3) there are problems in determining degrees of freedom for chi-squared goodness of fit tests, so that it is best to compare test statistics with simulated distributions, and (4) goodness of fit tests may not discriminate well between the three models.     

The Adoption of the Corporate Governance Model by Nonprofit Organizations

This article examines the circumstances under which nonprofit organizations adopt corporate governance practices. In the study reported here, the authors found that adoption of corporate governance practices depends primarily on the presence of a supportive institutional (that is, value) context as well as available resources to support governance restructuring. These findings strongly suggest that the adoption of structures and practices from the for-profit sector is neither a feasible nor even a desirable solution to problems facing many nonprofit organizations.     

Mothers' Emotions and Behavioral Support During Interactions with Toddlers: The Role of Child Temperament

This article examines mothers' support for children's interests and, specifically, emotional processes in mothers that may explain why they display different levels of support with children of different temperaments. We observed 114 mothers and their 14–27 month-old children during a laboratory interaction. Mothers rated children on three dimensions of temperament: activity, anger proneness, and social fearfulness. As expected, activity predicted mothers' anger, disappointment, and low support for children's interests. Social fearfulness predicted mothers' worry, low anger, low disappointment, and high support for children's interests. Mediational tests verified that (1) mothers' emotions often mediated the relation of child temperament to mothers' supportive behavior, and (2) children's compliance often mediated the relation of child temperament to mothers' emotions. Mothers tended to report negative emotion and to display relatively unsupportive behavior with children whose temperaments corresponded to attributes considered relatively undesirable for their sex.     

Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant

Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the?$40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of?$30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100%?of qualified applicants for the same money. We anticipate that the net result would be more and better research since more research would be conducted at the critical idea or discovery stage. Control of quality is assured through university hiring, promotion and tenure proceedings, journal reviews of submitted work, and the patent process, whose collective scrutiny far exceeds that of grant peer review. The greater efficiency in use of grant funds and increased innovation with baseline funding would provide a means of achieving the goals of the recent Canadian Value for Money and Accountability Review. We suggest that developing countries could leapfrog ahead by adopting from the start science grant systems that encourage innovation.     

Rural High School Youth's Access to and Use of School‐to‐Work Programs

Rural youth face numerous barriers that may limit career exposure. School‐to‐work (STW) programs are one tool used to increase exposure and facilitate connections between school and work. Using a nationally representative data set, the authors investigated whether rurality relates to the availability of STW programs and rural youth's program use. Results indicate that most schools provide school‐based services (e.g., career plans/career majors), but few schools offer work‐based services (e.g., internships). Rural schools were more likely to offer vocational–technical prep programs and job shadowing but were less likely to offer school‐based enterprise. After controlling for program availability, the authors found that rural students were less likely to take part in job shadowing and community service. Conclusions are offered for career development research, policy, and practice.     

Movement Building and the United States Social Forum

Despite the growing academic literature on the World Social Forum process, few scholars have attempted to systematically analyze the social, cultural, and political impact of the forums. This has to do in part with the inherent difficulties of assessing movement consequences, which is particularly complicated for an activity geared toward creating ‘open spaces.’ This article presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of the social forums through an analysis of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from the perspective of a local Boston-based delegation called the Boston Freedom Rides. We then use that framework to consider the impact of the 2010 USSF, bridging the academic literature on movement outcomes with activist perspectives. We make two related claims. First, the social forums, and the USSF in particular, should be viewed and their impact assessed in light of their generativity as ‘movement-building machines’: infrastructures designed for the production of social capital, networks, solidarities, meanings, frames, identities, knowledges, strategies, skills, and repertoires. Second, with respect to the Freedom Rides, the 2010 USSF contributed to movement building on multiple levels, but more so within rather than across movement sectors. Our goal is less to make a definitive argument about the impact of the 2010 USSF than to provide a helpful way of thinking about movement building as a social movement outcome, which can be applied and refined through further comparative and longitudinal research. We thus favor breadth over depth in outlining a broad framework for future inquiry.     

Browsing the culture: membership and intertextuality at a mormon bookstore

This paper argues that organizational and local host cultures are related through the intertextual performance of membership. It proceeds by claiming that organizations may be usefully read as intertexts, and that the relationship between organizations and their environments is enacted by speakers as they negotiate their multiple identities in talk. These claims are then used to analyze the intertextual performance of membership at a Salt Lake City, Utah bookstore owned by the Mormon church. The analysis demonstrates how: (1) organizational routines surrounding the interpretation of product serve as performances of host-cultural membership; (2) communication among and between store employees and customers clarifies types of host-cultural identity; and (3) the management of controversial texts enacts the organizational environment. The analysis is intended to mark an intersection between organizational and cultural studies by demonstrating how organizations potentially function as sites for the reproduction of interpretive communities, conducted through the use of cultural texts.