Tradition and transition: Family change in Israel

This article describes recent family change in Israel. Two opposing forces affect this process—factors resisting change and attempting to preserve traditional patterns, and factors producing and driving change. The former are mainly religion, familism, and the political situation; the latter are mainly global cultural influences and the need to adapt to changing environments. As a consequence the magnitude of change as measured by rates of marriage, divorce, fertility, and new family formations lags behind similar transformations in other Western developed countries. An empirical study in Israel shows that a majority of married women and mothers perceive of both family and work in the labor market as highly important and combine them in practice. Their occupational aspirations and achievements are, nevertheless, limited by strong traditional norms of familism. She is the author of Social Work: The Case of a Semi-Profession; Science in Cultural Context: Soviet Scientists in Comparatrive Perspective; Hurdles in the Halls of Science: The Israeli Case; and articles on immigrant scientists, professionals in organizations, and women in nontraditional occupations.     

论培养师范院校学生的科研能力

未来教师由现在的“教书匠”型向“专家、学者”型的转变趋势,已充分说明师范院校学生科研能力培养的必要性与重要性,而且,大学生求知欲强烈、思维活跃、研读时间充裕的特殊个性、优质大学师资,丰富藏书与先进科研设备,互联网开通等条件都充分说明师范院校学生科研能力培养的可行。应开设专门科研课程、成立学生科协与指导小组、组成学生课题组、合理安排学生在校与假期的科研活动,特别要处理好差异性“梯度式”安排、独立创新、科研与学习等活动的协调、经费保障等难题。     

Methodological Nationalism,the Social Sciences,and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology1

The article examines methodological nationalism, a conceptual tendency that was central to the development of the social sciences and undermined more than a century of migration studies. Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the global regime of nation‐states by the social sciences. Transnational studies, we argue, including the study of transnational migration, is linked to periods of intense globalization such as the turn of the twenty‐first century. Yet transnational studies have their own contradictions that may reintroduce methodological nationalism in other guises. In studying migration, the challenge is to avoid both extreme fluidism and the bounds of nationalist thought.     

Hostile Worlds or Connected Lives? Research on the Interplay Between Intimacy and Economy

Economic sociologists have devoted most of their attention to the activities of individuals and firms in markets. However, recent attempts have pushed for a better understanding of the relationship between intimacy and economy. Such efforts have been inspired, in large part, by Viviana Zelizer (2000, 2005). In her inquiry on the purchase of intimacy, Zelizer proposed seminal differentiations between the “hostile worlds,” “nothing but,” and “connected lives” perspectives, and advanced a cultural relational analysis of the economy. In this essay, we review research that applies Zelizer's framework, and suggest substantive and analytical avenues for future research on economy/intimacy nexus.     

The Emotional Climate of Nations and Their Culture of Peace

Societies seem to have emotional climates that affect how people feel and act in public situations. Unlike the emotions experienced in an individual's personal life, these modal feelings reflect a collective response to the socio-economic-political situation of the society and influence how most people behave toward one another and their government. A government may foster a climate of fear to ensure social control, or it may encourage the formation of heterogeneous social groups to facilitate a climate of trust between people from different groups. On one hand, emotional climates may be viewed as reflecting the relative peacefulness or violence of a society. Thus, an assessment of emotional climate may provide a subjective index of human security to complement objective measures of democracy, human rights, equality, and other factors that we presume are beneficial to human welfare. On the other hand, we may view emotional climates as influences that act to further or to impede the development of the culture of peace advocated by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Thus, their assessment may have predictive power, and measuring a society's emotional climate may help us to create desirable policy. In this article we show that it is possible to measure some important aspects of the emotional climates of three nations that have different degrees of a culture of peace: Norway, the United States, and India. We show that estimates of the collective emotions that constitute climate can be distinguished from reports of personal emotions in that the former are more influenced by nation and the latter by social class. It is the subjective experience of national emotional climate, rather than personal emotional experience, that appears most related to objective indices for the culture of peace in the different nations.