The Disneyization of Society

This article proposes the idea of Disneyization as a complementary notion to McDonaldization. Disneyization is depicted as a process by which the principles of the Disney theme parks dominate more and more sectors of society. It is presented as comprising four aspects: theming, dedifferentiation of consumption, merchandising, and emotional labour. The empirical manifestations of these attributes are outlined. The roots of Disneyization in theories of consumerism and consumer culture are examined and are contrasted with the grounding of McDonaldization in the idea of rationalization. Some of the theoretical implications of the contrasts between Disneyization and McDonaldization are presented.     

The psychoanalytic structure of trauma: Spellbound

This essay engages in a close analysis of two films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), in order to examine their approaches to trauma, especially in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of Nachträglichkeit (“afterwardsness”). A complex notion of afterwardsness is proposed whereby it is predicated on a relationship between two events, but where the importance of afterwardsness is not seen to lie in the nature of the events but rather on what determines the relationship between the two events. This determining relation thus leads to a notion of the structure of trauma and the argument that the crucial factor in a psychoanalytic approach to trauma lies not in an uncovering of traumatic events, but rather on the structure that retrospectively makes events traumatic.     

Adventure as Character Work: The Collective Taming of Fear

It is ultimately through experience that character is formulated and made evident. From an ethnographic examination of an adventure program (Ropes Adventure, Inc.) that attempts to mold the identity of adolescents who have been detained for minor felonies and misdemeanors, we examine how personal challenge can be channeled into moral messages. By evoking and then taming fear (adventure), organizations demonstrate the power of personal accomplishment, trust, and cooperation—each socially legitimated moral virtues. We argue that character building efforts may be hampered when organizational aims and actual implementation of structured adventure collide.     

Bootstrapping data with multiple levels of variation

The authors consider general estimators for the mean and variance parameters in the random effect model and in the transformation model for data with multiple levels of variation. They show that these estimators have different distributions under the two models unless all the variables have Gaussian distributions. They investigate the asymptotic properties of bootstrap procedures designed for the two models. They also report simulation results and illustrate the bootstraps using data on red spruce trees.     

An iterative Monte Carlo method for nonconjugate Bayesian analysis

The Gibbs sampler has been proposed as a general method for Bayesian calculation in Gelfand and Smith (1990). However, the predominance of experience to date resides in applications assuming conjugacy where implementation is reasonably straightforward. This paper describes a tailored approximate rejection method approach for implementation of the Gibbs sampler when nonconjugate structure is present. Several challenging applications are presented for illustration.     

Has the national minimum wage reduced UK wage inequality?

Summary.  The paper investigates the effect on the wage distribution of the introduction, in April 1999, of the national minimum wage (NMW) in the UK. Because of the structure of UK earnings statistics, it is not straightforward to investigate this and various methods for adjusting the published statistics are discussed. The main conclusions are that the NMW does have a detectable effect on the wage distribution and that compliance with the NMW is widespread but the effect is limited because the NMW has been set at a level such that only 6–7% of workers are directly affected and the NMW has had virtually no effect on the pay of workers who are not directly affected. Furthermore, virtually all the changes occurred within 2 months of the introduction in April 1999 and its effect declined over time from April 1999 to September 2001 as the minimum wage was not uprated in line with the increase in average earnings. The more substantial increase in the NMW in October 2001 partially, but not wholly, restored some of this decline in impact.