A Person Without a Past: Robert Michels and Alfred Schutz and the Sociology of the “Stranger”

Robert Michels and Alfred Schutz might not seem to have much in common. Michels was a political sociologist and Schütz was a philosopher of phenomenology, but they shared one crucial thing: they were both strangers in foreign countries. Michels left Germany for Italy and Switzerland because he was not permitted to complete the second degree necessary to teach at the university level while Schutz was compelled to leave Austria for France and the United States because of his Jewish background. Their experiences of trying to adapt in a foreign country prompted them to reflect on what it means to be “the stranger” (“Der Fremde”). Michels wrote “Materialien zu einer Soziologie des Fremden” in 1925 and Schutz published “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology” in 1944. While Schutz’ article has been repeatedly cited, there does not seem to be a study devoted to it. Michels' article remains among his most neglected writings. However, both works offer a theoretical and contextual account of the obstacles the stranger encounters when trying to understand and to acclimate oneself to a new environment. As Schutz noted, the stranger is a person “without a past”, and Michels suggested, is also a person with an uncertain future.     

Dynamic Choices of Hyperbolic Consumers

Laboratory and field studies of time preference find that discount rates are much greater in the short‐run than in the long‐run. Hyperbolic discount functions capture this property. This paper solves the decision problem of a hyperbolic consumer who faces stochastic income and a borrowing constraint. The paper uses the bounded variation calculus to derive the Hyperbolic Euler Relation, a natural generalization of the standard Exponential Euler Relation. The Hyperbolic Euler Relation implies that consumers act as if they have endogenous rates of time preference that rise and fall with the future marginal propensity to consume (e.g., discount rates that endogenously range from 5% to 41% for the example discussed in the paper).     

Paradoxes, locations and the need for social coherence: a qualitative study of living with a learning difficulty

Policy rhetoric over recent decades has promoted social inclusion of the more vulnerable sectors of society, such as people with learning difficulties. This study aimed to describe the experiences of people who live with learning difficulties in order to inform local service development. Thirty-five people with a learning difficulty and/or a family member were interviewed. A model of social coherence was developed that moves beyond the self-limiting debates about social inclusion and exclusion. It is underpinned by a sense of location for the person with a disability in relation to services and carers, family and community, dependency and risk, temporality and space, events, control and society. Key recommendations are for services to know the individual and his/her family; to be responsive to individual needs; to enhance the capacity of families and communities to support people with difficulty in learning; and to help these people to feel more valued.     

Practice experience and social work education

Abstract

This paper examines the arguments that are often put in favour of social work academics having direct practice experience in order to enhance their teaching effectiveness. The paper looks at the number of ways that social work academics can gain up to date knowledge of practice developments and explores what constitutes an effective teacher. It concludes that recent direct practice experience will be of limited use in assisting social work academics to become effective teachers and that there are other ways that academics can become aware of practice developments that are in line with the other professional requirements on academics such as research and knowledge generation.     

What difference do alternative immigration and integration levels make to Western Europe?

The population of Western Europe (EC plus EFTA) is seen as consisting of three sub-populations: the natives, the East-European immigrants, and the non-European immigrants. Different immigration levels assumed add to the non-native populations while different levels of integration describe the transition intensities from a non-native to a native category. Alternative multi-state population projections to 2050 based on six scenarios show that (1) in the case of no further immigration the total population of Western Europe will start to decline after 2010; (2) the rate of integration influences the future size of the non-European population much more than alternative levels of immigration; (3) in the long run the Eastern Europeans will be quantitatively insignificant; (4) the Western European population is bound to significant population aging no matter what happens with immigration; and (5) in the short to medium run immigrants contribute to the alleviation of the pension burden.La population d'Europe occidentale (CE et AELE) est décomposée en trois sous-populations: les natifs, les immigrants originaires d'Europe de l'Est, et les immigrants originaires du reste du monde. Les populations non-natives augmentent sous l'effet de divers niveaux d'immigration tandis que les intensités de passage d'une catégorie non-native à native sont décrites par différents niveaux d' intégration. Des projections de population jusqu'en 2050 dans ces divers états, basées sur six scénarios, montrent que: (1) la population totale de l'Europe occidentale commencerait à baisser après 2010, dans le cas d'un arrêt de l'immigration; (2) le taux d' intégration influencerait la taille future de la population non-européenne beaucoup plus fortement que le niveau d'immigration; (3) dans le long terme, les Européens de l'Est serait en nombre très réduit; (4) la population d'Europe occidentale connaîtra un vieillissement important de sa population, quelque soit ses flux d'immigrants; et (5) dans le court et le moyen terme les immigrants contribueraient à alléger le poids des retraites.     

Class and cuisine in contemporary Britain: the social space,the space of food and their homology

Thirty‐five years ago Pierre Bourdieu asserted that food preferences, as much as any other element of culture, are distributed within a space of difference more or less homologous with the social space of class positions. Plumbing data on annual spends on all manner of food items, he detected two key oppositions – a taste for the light versus a taste for the heavy on the one hand and a taste for rich foods versus a taste for healthy and exotic foods on the other – and located their generative principles in differences of volume of capital and composition of capital respectively. Deploying a correspondence analysis of similar data using the 2010 Living Costs and Food Survey, supplemented by data from the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey and the 2003 Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Survey, we seek to examine whether comparable differences in expenditure and preferences are observable in contemporary Britain and, consequently, to illuminate the current structure of the food space and its homology with class. Ultimately, we conclude that Bourdieu's general model is essentially transposable from 1960s France to the UK at the dawn of the 21st century, though we put additional emphasis on the ethical dimension of food consumption, and reflect on the prevalent instances of symbolic violence it underpins.     

Does Anti‐Hispanic Bias Motivate Opposition to Non‐English Languages?*

Contemporary political debates about language policy in the United States focus on three primary policy issues: bilingual education in public schools, English‐only legislation, and the access of non‐English speaking citizens to political rights. Using the “Multi‐Ethnic United States” module from the 2000 General Social Survey (GSS), this article tests multiple attitudinal, behavioral, demographic, and contextual hypotheses for how Anglos and African Americans view bilingual policy issues. We examine the role of linguistic contact, self‐interest, group threat, and discriminatory views of Latinos, finding that the latter—as measured by the “Three Ds” (Derogation, Disrespect, and Distance)—are the strongest predictors of attitudes toward bilingualism. Distance (social distance from Latinos) is consistently significant, disrespect (doubts about Latino contributions to the United States.) is mostly significant, and derogation (Latino stereotypes) is occasionally significant. Also, political ideology and knowledge of a non‐English language play important roles in the formation of favorable bilingualism opinions. However, the self‐interest and group threat variables were largely insignificant. Taken together, these findings indicate the importance of understanding how policy views may be structured by opinions about out‐group individuals and cultures. Language can serve as a proxy for immigrants themselves, as negative attitudes toward Latinos are associated with negative attitudes toward bilingualism.     

The Dark Side of Authenticity: Feeling “Real” While Gambling Interacts with Enhancement Motives to Predict Problematic Gambling Behavior

Engaging in activities that make people feel authentic or real is typically associated with a host of positive psychological and physiological outcomes (i.e., being authentic serves to increase well-being). In the current study, we tested the idea that authenticity might have a dark side among people engaged in an addictive or risky behavior (gambling). To test this possibility, we assessed gamblers (N = 61) who were betting on the National Hockey League playoff games at a sports bar. As predicted, people who felt authentic when gambling reported behavior associated with problem gambling (high frequency of betting) as well as problematic play (a big monetary loss and a big monetary win). Moreover, such behavior and gambling outcomes were particularly high among people who were motivated to gamble for the purpose of enhancement. The interaction of feeling authentic when betting and gambling for purposes of enhancing positive emotions proved especially troublesome for problematic forms of play. Implications of authenticity as a potential vulnerability factor for sports betting and other types of gambling are discussed.     

Approximating the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution normalization constant

By adding a second parameter, Conway and Maxwell created a new distribution for situations where data deviate from the standard Poisson distribution. This new distribution contains a normalization constant expressed as an infinite sum whose summation has no known closed-form expression. Shmueli et al. produced an approximation for this sum but proved that it was valid only for integer values of the second parameter, although they conjectured it was also valid for non-integers. Here we prove their conjecture to be true and discuss for what range of parameters the approximation can be accurately applied.