Cultural Anthropology and Open Access—Interview With Dominic Boyer,Cymene Howe,and Marcel LaFlamme

Abstract

In this installment of “Conversations,” Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and Marcel LaFlamme, of the Cultural Anthropology editorial team, discuss the ins and outs of publishing a gold open access journal in the field of anthropology. Highlights of the discussion include Cultural Anthropology’s move to open access, the ethics of open access, the growth of international readership, ongoing publishing challenges in open access, and the role libraries can play with open access publishing.     

Aquatic landscape change,extirpations, and introductions in the Chicago Region

Urban Ecosystems - Prior to European settlement, swamps, marshes, lakes, and streams were the major landscape features of the Chicago region. Much of this has been altered or lost in the past...     

Exploring intergenerational communication and stress in refugee families

More than half of the refugees who have resettled to the United States in recent years have been youth. Refugee youth have often witnessed or experienced violence and family separation prior to resettlement and face barriers to successful resettlement such as language and educational challenges. These factors elevate risk for mental and emotional distress, and protective factors like strong familial relationships are important to promoting mental well‐being. This study utilized focus groups with 36 refugees ages 18 to 25 from four ethnic groups to explore conceptualizations of and communication about mental and emotional distress within and outside of family systems. Youth reported a nuanced conceptualization of their premigration and postmigration stressors and their patterns of communication about distress in three domains: (a) exposure to traumatic stress prior to resettlement, (b) stressful experiences in resettlement, and (c) communication about mental health inside and outside of family groups.     

Power and Pay: The Politics of CEO Compensation

This paper examines CEO compensation, with an emphasis on the power of CEOs to influence their own compensation by managing the compensation process. It analyzes the CEO's power over the board of directors and the political tactics used by the CEO to manage the board and its compensation decisions. An empirical examination of CEO compensation in 203 large American manufacturing firms in 1985 illustrates the effect of CEO power on compensation and the flexibility available to the CEO in establishing the legitimacy of compensation. The implications of this perspective for management control of corporations and for CEO compensation research are considered.     

Developing social work education in Lithuania

From 1991 through 1998, during the turmoil of independence and transition to a democracy and free-market economy, the authors established the first social work education programme in Lithuania and assisted Lithuanian professionals to assume responsibility for the programme. This article supplies an initial general and conceptual narrative and analyses some of the factors that influenced the development of the programme and a practice model to address conditions in Lithuania.     

Sociology’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Suicide</Emphasis>: A Forensic Autopsy?

For decades Durkheim’s theory of suicide has been tested and found wanting. Yet, rather than being consigned to the dust-bin of history, it lives on and is pointed to as an exemplar of the powers of sociological theory and research. If this rationalizing and/or dismissal of so many falsifications of the theory were an isolated phenomenon, it might be evidence of some lemming-like propensity for suicide or a disciplinary death-wish, among a few sociologists. But it appears to be a much more widespread and common occurrence. In this paper we explore some possible explanations of this ‘falsification denial’—‘The Social Misconstruction of Reality’ (Hamilton 1996), ‘When Prophecy Fails’ (Festinger et al. 1956), ‘Underdetermination’ (Duhem 1954; Quine Journal of Philosophy 67:178–183, 1970, Erkenntnis 9:313–328, 1975; Lakatos 1970), and ‘Boundary Maintenance’ (Erikson 1966), and we outline some of the more important and pernicious consequences of this falsification denial for the discipline and future of sociology.     

Waning vigilance and the disposition effect: Evidence from Thailand on individual investor decision making

We argue that existing explanations for the stock-market investor's disposition to “ride losers too long” are unsatisfactory because they abstract from any role for information processing. We propose instead that the disposition effect is a special case of “waning vigilance:” investors pay less attention to new information and analysis when making decisions about loss makers and are therefore slower to sell them when arguments in favor of holding cease to be valid. Results from a Thai individual investor survey are presented as empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that vigilance is reduced following losses.     

The impact of place? A reassessment of the importance of the South in affecting beliefs about racial inequality

Research shows that individuals living in the southern part of the United States express more negative racial attitudes than those living outside the South. Using data from The American National Election Study (NES), the purpose of this paper is to assess whether key factors often associated with the Southern attitude distinction are indeed more potent in the South than elsewhere. Drawing data from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, we further assess whether the impact of the South has increased or decreased over time. Results indicate that the impact of the South is negligible at best. Findings do show that place does matter for conservatives. However, in this case, non-South location matters more than the South. Relative to their liberal counterparts, conservatives in the non-South espouse more individualistic beliefs than do their Southern counterparts. These findings are discussed within the dominant theoretical framework in this area.     

Eliciting Risk and Time Preferences

We design experiments to jointly elicit risk and time preferences for the adult Danish population. Since subjects are generally risk averse, we find that joint elicitation provides estimates of discount rates that are significantly lower than those found in previous studies and more in line with what would be considered as a priori reasonable rates. The statistical specification relies on a theoretical framework that involves a latent trade‐off between long‐run optimization and short‐run temptation. Estimation of this specification is undertaken using structural, maximum likelihood methods. Our main results based on exponential discounting are robust to alternative specifications such as hyperbolic discounting. These results have direct implications for attempts to elicit time preferences, as well as debates over the appropriate domain of the utility function when characterizing risk aversion and time consistency.