Negotiating the NGO/Social Movement Dichotomy: Evidence from Punjab,India

Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and social movements are often juxtaposed as two distinct modes of action within civil society. While NGOs are seen as being linked to the interests of donors and being composed primarily of middle-class professionals, social movements are presented as a more authentic expression of grassroots perspectives. While academic literature compares and contrasts these two forms of organisation in the abstract, there has been comparatively little research exploring how civil society actors themselves conceptualise the NGO/social movement dichotomy and how this influences their strategic decision making. The Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), working in the North Indian state of Punjab, is a useful case for exploring this issue. KVM is one of a growing number of groups working in the field of sustainable agriculture that has chosen to adopt a social movement model of organisation and distance itself from NGOs. The case helps illuminate how and why social movements differentiate themselves from NGOs and the challenges they face in doing so.     

Infants Associate Praise and Admonishment with Fair and Unfair Individuals

Recent evidence suggests that infants possess a rudimentary sensitivity to fairness: Infants expect resources to be distributed fairly and equally, and prefer individuals that distribute resources fairly over those that do so unfairly. The goal of this work was to determine whether infants' evaluations of fair and unfair individuals also includes an understanding that fair individuals are worthy of praise and unfair individuals are worthy of admonishment. After watching individuals distribute goods fairly or unfairly to recipients, 15‐month‐old (Experiments 1 and 2) and 13‐month‐old (Experiment 3) infants took part in a test phase in which they saw only the distributors' faces accompanied by praise or admonishment. Across all experiments, infants differentially shifted their visual attention to images of the fair and unfair distributors as a function of the accompanying praise or admonishment, although the direction in which they did so varied by age. Thus, by the start of the second year of life, infants appear to perceive fair individuals as morally praiseworthy and unfair individuals as morally blameworthy.     

Dialogic strategies and outcomes: An analysis of environmental advocacy groups’ Facebook profiles

Previous studies of advocacy groups’ Web sites suggest that the use of dialogic strategies could lead to greater dialogic communication. This study examined whether dialogic strategies utilized by environmental advocacy groups via their social networking profiles lead to greater dialogic engagement between organizations and visitors. This study offers the first examination of the relationship between the creation of an online space for dialogue and actual dialogic engagement by identifying and measuring six dialogic outcomes.     

The Polls-Review: Inaccurate Age and Sex Data in the Census Pums Files: Evidence and Implications

We discover and document errors in public-use microdata samples ("PUMS files") of the 2000 Census, the 2003-2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004-2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men age 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files differ by as much as 15 percent from counts in published data tables. Moreover, an analysis of labor-force participation and marriage rates suggests the PUMS samples are not representative of the population at individual ages for those age 65 and over. PUMS files substantially underestimate labor-force participation of those near retirement age and overestimate labor-force participation rates of those at older ages. These problems were an unintentional byproduct of the misapplication of a newer generation of disclosure-avoidance procedures carried out on the data. The resulting errors in the public-use data could significantly impact studies of people age 65 and older, particularly analyses of variables that are expected to change by age.     

Social Drivers of Water Utility Privatization in the United States: An Examination of the Presence of Variegated Neoliberal Strategies in the Water Utility Sector

This study uses a logistic regression analysis to investigate the social drivers of water utility privatization in the United States at the local level. In order to do so I combine data gathered from the Environmental Protection Agency's 2012 Safe Drinking Water Information System database and use it in conjunction with the U.S. census's 2008–12 county‐level demographic estimates. I use a logistic regression analysis in order to examine the relationship between theoretically relevant social factors and the probability of a privately owned or operated water system being located within a community. Key findings suggest that water utility privatization in the United States follows the logic of a variegated neoliberalism and constitutes a form of environmental injustice.