Sustainability standards and certification: looking through the lens of Foucault's dispositif

Over the past few decades, sustainability standards and certification have come to play an important role in the global governance of production and trade. Their purpose is to address the environmental and social problems generated by the globalization of the economy. Yet, as scholars and actors alike have pointed out, framing these problems in terms of technical criteria and procedures might result in rendering some issues invisible and closing potential debate and contestation. Through the empirical analysis of a multi‐stakeholder initiative called the ‘Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil', our aim is to explore how civil society organizations and advocacy networks nevertheless draw new lines of power by using, putting to the test, correcting and constructing formalized knowledge. To shed light on these processes of resistance, we advance an analytic that restores the concept of dispositif coined by Michel Foucault in emphasizing both the disruptive and stabilizing lines that compose a dispositif.     

BIRTH ORDER AND RISKY ADOLESCENT BEHAVIOR

It is commonly believed that birth order is an important determinant of success. However, previous studies in this area have failed to provide convincing evidence that birth order is related to test scores, education, or earnings. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–1979, we investigate the association between birth order and adolescent behaviors such as smoking, drinking, marijuana use, sexual activity, and crime. Our estimates show that middle borns and last borns are much more likely to use substances and be sexually active than their firstborn counterparts. These results provide the strongest evidence to date that birth order is related to measurable behaviors. (JEL I12 , J12 , J13 )     

INTERVIEWER GENDER AND GENDER ATTITUDES

This research addresses the effects of interviewer gender onresponses to a broad array of gender-related survey questions,using data from a probability sample of adults in the UnitedStates. We focus on whether gender-of-interviewer effects areevident, whether they vary by respondent gender, and whetherthey vary across several attitudinal domains relevant to genderinequality. While many items do not show statistically significantgender-of-interviewer effects, we document significant effectsacross a variety of items. When such effects are evident, theytend to involve both male and female respondents expressingmore egalitarian gender-related attitudes or greater criticismof existing gender inequalities to female interviewers. Malerespondents offer significantly different responses to maleand female interviewers on questions dealing with gender inequalityin employment. For female respondents, interviewer-gender effectsare evident for items addressing gender-related collective action,policy, and group interests. Using multivariate models thatallow us to represent both respondent-level and interviewer-levelvariables, we find that interviewer-gender effects are statisticallysignificant in most attitudinal domains but that the interactionbetween interviewer gender and respondent gender does not tendto be statistically significant. We consider the implicationsof these findings both for understanding the survey processand for understanding gender relations more generally.     

An Empirical Investigation of Music and Gambling Behaviour

There has been an increasing amount of research that has examined the structural and situational characteristics of gambling behaviour. However, there is a lack of research examining the role of music and gambling. This study investigated the effects of background music on virtual roulette gaming behaviour under laboratory conditions. There was one independent variable of music with three conditions. The three conditions were (i) no music, (ii) slow tempo music, and (iii) fast music. A total of 60 participants were allocated to one of the three conditions. Ten games of roulette were played with speed of betting, amount spent across high, medium and low-level risk bets and total amount spent recorded. The winner with the most money at the end of the session was rewarded with a non-monetary prize. Results indicated that speed of betting was influenced by musical tempo with faster betting occurring while listening to higher tempo music. There was no relationship between musical tempo and either the size of the bet or the overall amount spent. The results provide valuable insight into how background music can be manipulated to increase betting speed. The implications of these findings for problem gambling management and commercial benefits are discussed.     

Colonialism and its Contradictions: Indians, Blacks and Social Power in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Mexico

Abstract This article examines patterns in the black/Indian relationship in Mexico during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on microlevels of society and on the practice of power in two pivotal domains, one centered on instances of labor coercion and civil control, and the other on what was labelled "witchcraft." The analysis suggests that Spanish colonialism embodied contradictions at its very foundations as it created sites of power for both blacks and Indians, who were alternately constituted as dominating and subordinated subjects vis-à-vis each other and the Spanish colonizers.     

Trust after the Global Financial Meltdown

Over the last decade, and culminating in the 2008 global financial meltdown, there has been an erosion of trust and a concomitant rise of distrust in domestic companies, multinational enterprises, and political economies. In response to this attrition, this article presents three arguments. First, we suggest that trust is the “glue” of any viable political economy, and we propose that the stakes of violating public trust are particularly high in light of the asymmetry between trust and distrust. Second, we identify a constellation of key barriers to overcoming distrust that companies face in the current environment: (1) corporate mind‐sets that promote a preoccupation with quantification, hierarchical leadership models, and “blind trust” in authority; (2) the anonymity of core stakeholders; (3) the agency of the media as a driver of the political economy; and (4) firm‐centric models of stakeholder relationships. Third, we argue that, notwithstanding these challenges, these phenomena are not fatal and can be addressed through a holistic transformation in corporate culture. Such a transformation might include a shift to collaborative leadership models and replacing authority models with responsibility, a “names and faces” approach to stakeholders through cases and stories, more egalitarian communication exchanges with external stakeholders, and a reprioritization of the firm as a vital element among others within a system rather than the central core of a network. We conclude that the value of trust at the individual, institutional, national, and global levels cannot be overstated. Without a reinvigoration of trust in our political economies, at all levels, the future of an economically vibrant planet is indeed bleak.     

The political transnationalism of Ecuadorians in Barcelona,Madrid and Milan: the role of individual resources,organizational engagement and the political context

In this article, we examine the transnational political engagement of Ecuadorians in three European cities – Barcelona, Madrid and Milan. Drawing on previous studies that emphasize the role of organizational and institutional resources for political mobilization (as well as those that take into consideration respondents’ resources and the migration process), we analyse the results of a survey conducted between 2006 and 2008 on approximately 300 Ecuadorian individuals in each of these three cities. We examine two different dimensions of Ecuadorian political transnationalism at the individual level, namely attitudinal and participatory. Contrary to previous findings, our results show that recently arrived Ecuadorians and those with less stable household conditions are more involved in transnational politics. Associational involvement shows multiple effects. Engagement in Ecuadorian associations fosters political interest in and information about Ecuador, whereas involvement in any organization promotes electoral transnational politics. The political context is only relevant when accounting for participation in Ecuadorian elections.     

A Matching Prior for the Shape Parameter of the Skew‐Normal Distribution

Abstract. This paper deals with the issue of performing a default Bayesian analysis on the shape parameter of the skew‐normal distribution. Our approach is based on a suitable pseudo‐likelihood function and a matching prior distribution for this parameter, when location (or regression) and scale parameters are unknown. This approach is important for both theoretical and practical reasons. From a theoretical perspective, it is shown that the proposed matching prior is proper thus inducing a proper posterior distribution for the shape parameter, also when the likelihood is monotone. From the practical perspective, the proposed approach has the advantages of avoiding the elicitation on the nuisance parameters and the computation of multidimensional integrals.