Sex work: constructing ‘families’ with community of practice theory

This article examines the construction and maintenance of fictive kinships within a street-level sex work community. The analysis is supported by interviews of 14 street-level sex workers regarding everyday language use within their community. Utilizing community of practice theory to demonstrate how peripheral participants of the sex work community are socialized to understand and participate in fictive kinships, a primary finding is that language use within this community operates as a discursive framework which creates a metaphorical family where kin terms are used as an identity-making strategy. The implications of this research suggest that familial structures impact sex workers' sense of agency in relation to other members of the community. Finally, this article discusses the implications for understanding the discourse of a street-level sex worker community in the context of relationship formation and maintenance.     

Social Citizenship Rights and the Welfare Circle Dilemma: Attitudinal Findings of Two Chinese Societies

This paper places social citizenship momentum into the context of squaring the welfare circle for examination. Citizenship is a powerful world-level organizing principle especially by the minority groups for their claim of equal treatment. The squaring of welfare circle refers to the need of the governments to constrain their budgets but also meet the rising demands from and needs of their people. This comparative study looks at the attitudinal findings of two Chinese societies of Hong Kong and Taiwan to see whether or not the cultural factor can mitigate the momentum of social citizenship rights and the demand side of the welfare circle. Implications for social policy are also discussed.     

East meets West: internist also practices acupuncture

Meet Col. Arnyce Pock, a Western-trained internist who made several trips to China to study the ancient art of acupuncture.     

Interactive remembering: Insights into the communicative competence of older adults

This paper challenges some of the traditional views of older adults' speech by considering conversational narrative interaction among three elderly peers from a life-span developmental perspective of aging. A range of pragmatic models developed primarily for younger adults' talk are extended to facilitate an analysis of interaction among elderly peers, showing how the speakers in the data use sophisticated strategies to recall events and establish communicative bridges between conversation participants. The differing social and communicative goals of older adults are examined, contrasting their communicative, and particularly narrative, competency with negative perceptions of elderly discourse, thus demonstrating that to view aging as synonymous with linguistic decline is unfounded.     

Olympic news and attitudes towards the Olympics: a compositional time-series analysis of how sentiment is affected by events

Sentiment affects the evolving economic valuation of companies through the stock market. It is unclear how ‘news’ affects the sentiment towards major public investments like the Olympics. In this paper we consider, from the context of the pre-event stage of the 30th Olympiad, the relationship between attitudes towards the Olympics and Olympic-related news; specifically the bad news associated with an increase in the cost of provision, and the good news associated with Team Great Britain's medal success in 2008. Using a unique data set and an event-study approach that involves compositional time-series analysis, it is found that ‘good’ news affects sentiments much more than ‘bad’, but that the distribution of such sentiment varies widely. For example, a much more pronounced effect of good news is identified for females than males, but ‘bad’ news has less of an impact on the young and older age groups.     

Profiteering from Disaster: Why Planners Need to be Paying More Attention to Insurance

Insurance is overlooked in planning practice and research. Focusing on house and contents insurance in Australia’s disaster-prone areas, I describe why the impacts of insurance availability and pricing on urban form requires greater attention from planners. With increasing climate change-related risks, the growing influence of insurance and insurers is exacerbating social and financial inequity: fostering disadvantaged enclaves and protected pockets of wealth, and sustaining insurer profits. I call for the better integration of insurance within planning, particularly a more considered and careful mobilization of insurance in disaster preparation. I present four research questions for advancing planning in disaster-prone urban areas.     

Foreign aid and the rule of law: Institutional diffusion versus legal reach

This paper examines the role of bilateral foreign aid in supporting the diffusion and enactment of common models and institutions of the rule of law among aid-recipient low- and middle-income countries. We ask whether aid targeted at security-sector reform and the rule of law influences the adoption of constitutional and legal reforms over time (institutional diffusion), and whether aid also supports more effective implementation of the rule of law, writ large (legal reach). We use event history and fixed-effects panel regression models to examine a sample of 154 countries between 1995 and 2013 to answer these questions. Our findings suggest that aid does increase the likelihood of adopting several rule of law reforms, but its effect on increasing the depth or quality of rule of law over time within countries is much less substantial. These findings suggest that though aid may play a role in supporting the diffusion of models contributing to state isomorphism among countries, it is less effective at increasing the pervasiveness and quality of such model’s implementation. This discrepancy between the effectiveness of bilateral aid in promoting law on the books versus law in action in aid recipient countries calls into question the current approach to rule of law reforms.     

Fertility Behavior of Interracial Couples

Despite the unprecedented rise in the number of intermarriages and multiracial individuals in recent decades, our understanding about the fertility behavior of interracial couples is limited. Using data from the 2002 and 2006–2015 National Survey of Family Growth, this study compares the risk of pregnancy and the pregnancy intentions of interracial couples with those of same‐race couples. Interracial couples' risk of pregnancy differed little from that of same‐race White couples, with the exception of White wife–Black husband couples, whose risk of pregnancy was higher than both same‐race White and Black couples. Neither socioeconomic disparities nor union characteristics explained their elevated pregnancy risk. Interracial couples' risk of unintended pregnancy mirrored closely that of same‐race couples from the husband's racial or ethnic group. Socioeconomic disparity was the primary driver of differences in pregnancy intentions between interracial and same‐race White couples.