The dilemma of recognition: Administrative categories and cultural diversity

Governments around the world combat inequality by means of group-specific redistribution. Some pursue redistribution that benefits groups, but also wish to avoid accentuating or even recognizing group distinctions. This poses a dilemma that they try to resolve by adjusting the category system used to target redistribution. There are three types of adjustment: accommodation (the multicultural approach), denial (the ideal-typical liberal solution), and replacement (a compromise). In replacement the targets of redistributive policies are constructed to avoid accentuation or recognition of inconvenient group distinctions, but still allow redistribution that benefits these groups. Replacement is increasingly in demand around the world because the disadvantages of multiculturalism are becoming apparent while denial is hard to sustain in the face of group inequality. The actual effect of replacement is little researched and less understood, however. Does it resolve the dilemma of recognition? Two examples–India and Nigeria–where replacement has been tried ever since the 1950s cast doubt on its viability.     

Evaluating DISCOVER's Effectiveness in Enhancing College Students' Social Cognitive Career Development

College students (20 women, 14 men) seeking career counseling services at a university career center participated in this exploratory investigation. A 2 (DISCOVER treatment) × 2 (counseling treatment) research design was used to evaluate the individual and combined effects of DISCOVER (ACT, 1998) and counseling on participants' career decision‐making self‐efficacy and career decision‐making attributional style. Findings revealed a significant effect of the use of DISCOVER on participants' career decision‐making self‐efficacy and their sense of control over the career decision‐making process. Results are discussed regarding the implications for career counseling and ideas for further research in this domain.     

Asymptotic bias in the linear mixed effects model under non-ignorable missing data mechanisms

Summary.  In longitudinal studies, missingness of data is often an unavoidable problem. Estimators from the linear mixed effects model assume that missing data are missing at random. However, estimators are biased when this assumption is not met. In the paper, theoretical results for the asymptotic bias are established under non-ignorable drop-out, drop-in and other missing data patterns. The asymptotic bias is large when the drop-out subjects have only one or no observation, especially for slope-related parameters of the linear mixed effects model. In the drop-in case, intercept-related parameter estimators show substantial asymptotic bias when subjects enter late in the study. Eight other missing data patterns are considered and these produce asymptotic biases of a variety of magnitudes.     

Corporate funding of the arts in a turbulent environment

Focusing on funding in culture and the arts, the author identifies a distinctive logic of company support for nonprofit organizations. Business giving is increasingly disciplined around company objectives, giving levels are driven by pretax earnings, and giving decisions are the province of managers who draw advice less from the arts community or public agencies than from other companies. At best, turbulence in government funding has modest effect on corporate support. In turn, change in corporate support has little impact on public backing. The separate logics of corporate and government support imply separate and distinctive long-term development strategies for nonprofit organizations.     

Reasoning With Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from classical first–order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: Adding premises overturns conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify metaprinciples that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments, and it paves the way toward a complete classical theory.