"Is Public Sociology Such a Good Idea?"

Michael Burawoy's call for a public sociology disciplined by professional and policy sociology, on the one side, and driven by critical sociology, on the other, exposes the ideological biases of sociology to publics. In so doing, public sociology will thwart non-ideological efforts for sociology to exert influence on broader publics and on political decision-makers. In order for sociology to be able to influence public opinion and the decisions of key players in the political and economic arenas, it will need to earn respect through a long evolutionary process of careful research and explanation without ideological fervor. To expose the ideological biases of sociology will thwart this evolutionary process. In contrast, sociology would be much better to develop an engineering mentality in addressing issues, problems, and concerns of publics in present-day societies.     

Confusion of Relative and Absolute Risk in Valuation

Subjects were less willing to pay for government medical insurance for diseases when the number of people who could not be cured was higher, holding constant the number who could be cured. In a second experiment, willingness to pay (from a hypothetical government windfall) for risk reduction was unaffected by whether the risk was described in terms of percentage or number of lives saved, even though subjects knew that the risks in question differed in prevalence. These results are consistent with the findings of Fetherstonhaugh et al., Jenni and Loewenstein, and others. I suggest that these results can be explained in terms of a general tendency to confuse proportions and differences, a confusion that is analogous to other confusions of quantitative dimensions in children, adults, the news media, and perhaps even the epidemiological literature.     

A Graphical Diagnostic for Identifying Influential Model Choices in Bayesian Hierarchical Models

Abstract. Real‐world phenomena are frequently modelled by Bayesian hierarchical models. The building‐blocks in such models are the distribution of each variable conditional on parent and/or neighbour variables in the graph. The specifications of centre and spread of these conditional distributions may be well motivated, whereas the tail specifications are often left to convenience. However, the posterior distribution of a parameter may depend strongly on such arbitrary tail specifications. This is not easily detected in complex models. In this article, we propose a graphical diagnostic, the Local critique plot, which detects such influential statistical modelling choices at the node level. It identifies the properties of the information coming from the parents and neighbours (the local prior) and from the children and co‐parents (the lifted likelihood) that are influential on the posterior distribution, and examines local conflict between these distinct information sources. The Local critique plot can be derived for all parameters in a chain graph model.     

Renegotiating religious transnationalism: fractures in transnational Chinese evangelicalism

In this article, I question to what extent future generations of immigrants will engage in practices of religious transnationalism through their ethnic institutions. I examine how leaders of the next generation of English‐speaking Chinese Canadian evangelicals made sense of their participation in the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, a movement that rallies behind both a pan‐Chinese identity and the belief that the Chinese have a special role in evangelizing the world. I argue that the call to religious mobilization grounded in Chinese ethnicity stands on tenuous ground and propose that linguistic, geographical, generational and ideological fractures may diminish the participation of future generations of the Chinese diaspora in ethnically‐based transnational religious organizations. I conclude that these developments would push ‘negotiated transnational religious networks’ into a state of ‘renegotiation'.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

Can Cool Japan save Post‐Disaster Japan? On the Possibilities and Impossibilities of a Cool Japanology

This article considers Cool Japan in light of catastrophe, first theoretically through a phenomenological analysis of Cool Japan and Cool Japanology, suggesting that the study of Cool Japan itself is way of uncooling the object of inquiry, itself a reaction to the apocalyptic realities of everyday life since the dawn of the modern world. The article finishes with a sociological reflection on current events through a détourner of the sekai kei genre in Summer Wars' inclusion of two sociological types in its rendition of catastrophe. This article then is intended as a preliminary step to understanding the specificity and commonalities of Japanese cool power through an understanding of the phenomenon of cool and the contents to which cool often refers.     

THE IMPACT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND HUMAN CAPITAL ON WAGES

Historically, economists have taken the position that psychological capital is either unobservable or immeasurable; thus, heretofore, little evidence has been available on the contribution of psychological capital to wages. Using data drawn from two different waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we offer evidence that psychological capital has both a direct effect—via self-esteem—and an indirect effect—through locus of control—on an individual's real wage. We find a person s wage is more sensitive to changes in self-esteem than to comparable alterations in human capital. Both relative wages and human capital contribute to self-esteem.     

Reception to Prison

Summary The paper is concerned with the admission process to prison.The paper begins by outlining some of the current views on theeffects of imprisonment and the adjustment of the inmate toprison life. Gofiman in particular has identified the importantpart played by admission procedures in depriving the individualof his personal identity and immersing him in the institutionalsystem.The authors studied the admission procedures at two penalestablishments to see how far these showed the characteristicsdescribed by Gofrman as being 'fairly standard in total institutions'.The paper describes how the study was conducted, and gives anaccount of the admission procedure at the institutions. In theirfindings the authors try to assess the impact of this systemon the inmate, and its significance within the total socialsystem of the institution. The study casts doubt on the generalapplicability of Goffman's hypothesis, but at the same timeshows that the admission procedure has a potential for introducingthe inmate to his new environment in a constructive way, whichis not being realized within the present system     

DO REAL ESTATE BROKERS ADD VALUE WHEN LISTING SERVICES ARE UNBUNDLED?

This paper measures the effects of real estate brokerage services provided to sellers, other than MLS listings, on the terms and timing of home sales. It is not obvious that sellers benefit from those services. On the one hand, brokers offer potentially useful knowledge and expertise. On the other hand, because the relationship between the homeowner and the broker resembles a classical principal‐agent problem, the broker may not deploy services in ways that promote the seller's interests. Yet as long as valuable MLS listings are bundled with brokerage services, homeowners may use brokers even if the agency costs exceed the benefits of brokers' knowledge and expertise. Thus, quantification of the net value of brokerage services other than MLS listings bears directly on the recent policy debate over the desirability unbundling of MLS listings. We estimate the effect of a seller's decision to use a broker on list prices, selling prices, and speed of sale for a real estate market with an unusual and critical characteristic: it has a single open‐access listing service that is used by essentially all sellers, regardless of whether they employ brokers. Our central finding is that, when listings are not tied to brokerage services, a seller's use of a broker reduces the selling price of the typical home by 5.9% to 7.7%, which indicates that agency costs exceed the advantages of brokers' knowledge and expertise by a wide margin. (JEL D12, R31, L85)