Secularization and the politics of traditionalism: The case of the right-to-life movement

Research on the traditionalist movement against abortion needs alignment with currents in historical sociology, the theory of social movements and the sociology of politics. The religious (specifically, Christian) basis of the right-to-life movement has attracted considerable attention in the literature. The movement is seen as a traditionalist bloc claiming to oppose secularization and return to customary restrictions. However the tradition in question appears to be a recent social construction. There is slim warrant in the actual traditions of Western religion for asserting a categorical right to life. As a result, the movement's ideology is best approached as the product of—rather than the antidote to—secularizing processes (including the demographic transition, discourse about rights, markets for symbolic entrepreneurs and the separation of church and state) and possibly as an unintended import from non-Western religion. Implications for traditionalism, the functions of religion, and the study of countermovements are explored. This case illustrates the value of attending to historical sequences and the external cultural environments of social movements.     

The encoding and decoding of liking from behavioral cues in both auditory and visual channels

Fifty high school students met in same-sex dyads for the first time over a cup of coffee in an experimental room designed as a comfortable living room. They then responded to a questionnaire designed to measure liking and perceived similarity. The interactions were video-taped. Two different panels of 6 judges later either viewed (video only) or heard (audio-only) the videotape and raed the subjects behavior on a number of scales. The judges also judged the degree of liking felt by the subjects by estimating subjects responses to the questionnaire. In addition gaze behaviour during the interaction was measured. Factor analysis demonstrated that 60% of the variance in The Liking Scale was attributed to 14 items relating to liking and perceived similarity. A separate factor to assess perceived similarity could not be found. Twenty-nine percent of the variance in the liking reported by subjects was predicted by an interrelated pattern of expressing behaviour including approproate looking, mutual gaze, self-disclosure, synchrony in movement and gesture, expressiveness of the face and liveliness of the voice. Video judges liking correlated 0.33 with subjects liking and 48% of the variance in their judgements was explained by the valid cues of looking and expressiveness of the face. Audio judges liking, although it correlated at 0.34 with video judges liking, did not correlate at all with subjects' liking because of an over-reliance on the important content cues. It is suggested that major problems leading to decoding inaccuracy may be over-reliance on content cues and over-confidence in the possibility of decoding accuracy. The evidence suggests that differences between subjects in encoding may be considerable.     

Business restructuring,management control,and corporate organization

Conclusions After half a century of growing dominance of the large corporation by non-owning managers, the 1980s were marked by a slowing or even reversing of their quiet revolution. Professional managers had come to control the corporation on the premise that they could more efficiently produce shareholder value than the original founder-owners. They turned shareholding into a passive investment on the same premise. As companies faced increasingly competitive pressures during the 1980s, however, the legitimacy of the rule of incumbent management came under challenge. No longer could government interference be blamed for many of the problems facing business; fingers pointed at management itself. As the criticism of corporate leadership gathered momentum, a leading diagnosis focused on one of managerial capitalism's crowning achievements: the autonomous power of professional management.The critique viewed the managerial autonomy as excessively permissive, the agency system as no longer effective. Professional managers had come to show too much concern for the social welfare of various stakeholder groups, including themselves, and too little concern for the financial welfare of the only stakeholder group that should really count — the shareholders. Many of the restructuring efforts were thus undertaken in the name of returning companies to the single-minded pursuit of ownership interests. What had stood in the way of such a pursuit was less a matter of government constraint and more a matter of inadequate stockholder vigilance by their appointed agents.Mindful of the critique, incumbent managements moved during the mid- to late-1980s to improve stockholder returns by paring the workforce and cutting other costs. Corporate acquisitions and leveraged buyouts brought new management teams to the fore where others had seemingly fallen short. The resulting restructuring reached a large proportion of the nation's major companies. Half or more of the largest companies had undergone a significant reduction in their workforce. And the dollar value of company resources changing ownership hands expanded considerably. The aggregate purchase price of mergers and acquisitions of publicly-traded firms in 1988 was nearly three times greater than in 1981. Even more striking was the sharp increase in the number of publicly-traded companies and divisions that were taken private. The aggregate dollar value of such buyouts in 1988 had increased almost 25 times over that in 1981. This opening of the market for corporate control among major U.S. firms brought a significant fraction of the nation's large corporations more directly under the immediate oversight of ownership interests.The reassertion of ownership control over large corporations was usually taken in the name of improving corporate earnings. Would be takeover groups generally promised more internal discipline and stronger financial performance. Whatever the actual financial impact of the intensification of ownership interests, available research suggests that it has had organizational impact. General company strategies may come to be more centrally guided while specific operating actions are devolved further down the organization.Ownership change and other restructuring steps have also ramified into corporate social and political action. That outreach is likely to be less vigorous and more divided. It is also being redirected. During the 1970s and early 1980s, corporate energies focused on reducing government regulation and improving community opinion. Those energies are now increasingly focused on facilitating or resisting restructuring. Companies have fought legislation that would limit the process of plant closings, but they have also sought legislation to protect themselves against hostile takeovers.The evidence also suggests that considerable managerial discretion remains in shaping company response to the restructuring pressures. Although market and organizational factors are sure to act as constraints, top management, whether a relatively autonomous non-owning management group or an owner-dominated management, retains an important independent capacity to exercise strategic choice. That choice is likely to receive special shaping by the long-term ascendance of financial managers and the decline of manufacturing personnel at the executive level.Yet corporate change must not be viewed as isolated managerial responses to changing market conditions. Companies and managements frequently look to one another for guidance in coping with ambiguous circumstances. DiMaggio and Powell's analysis of organizational isomorphism, for example, suggests that firms frequently adopt organizational practices not because they are dictated by the firm's market strategies, but rather because they are already used by other companies. Similarly, Granovetter's analysis of the social embeddedness of economic action indicates that company decisions are partially shaped by top management's contacts with their counterparts in other firms. Understanding company responses to restructuring pressures therefore requires a focus on inter-company flows of ideas and doctrines as well as purely internally generated responses specific to the company. Reactions to the restructuring pressures that are collectively developed and defined in the broader business community may prove to be as critical as individually fashioned solutions in guiding management approaches to restructuring during the years to come.

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Estimating fecundability from data on waiting times to first conception

"This article tests assumptions invoked in the demographic literature to estimate the population distribution of fecundability from data on waiting times to first conception. In continuous time, the key assumption is that waiting times are realizations from a mixture of exponentials distribution. In discrete time, the key assumption is that waiting times are realizations from a mixture of geometrics distribution. The [U.S.] Hutterite data analyzed by Sheps (1965) are consistent with this assumption. Various models, however, have one representation in mixture of exponentials form. A fundamental identification problem plagues the conventional estimation procedure. Our analysis calls into question the conventional practice of checking model specification by using goodness-of-fit tests. The practical importance of the identification problem in duration models is demonstrated."     

Zeroing in on leadership effectiveness: The methodological challenges of benchmarking leadership practices

Business success in the 21st century will be based on the widespread mastery of leadership roles, rather than on the directives of a professional or leadership elite. The first step for systematically enacting a leadership development agenda for our nation is to identify the factors, values or qualities most important to leadership effectiveness. Next, we must improve our understanding of how these guiding ideas and insights translate into what successful leaders do. As we perfect this understanding, we will need to operationally define the best practices of successful leaders. These best practices must then become benchmarks for intensive leadership development efforts.This article considers nine methodological challenges of the first agenda item-identification of the factors, values or qualities most important to leadership effectiveness. To illustrate these challenges, the authors use their own business leadership research as a case study. This research surveys 127 chairmen, chief executive officers, and presidents-a cross section of successful U.S.A. business leaders, including men and women from all parts of the nation who have diverse industry, racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The authors identify where methodological improvements are needed to cope with the challenges of leadership research. They suggest important directions for methodological development and propose three minimum standards for future leadership research.     

Community,Family, and Race/Ethnic Differences in Health Status in Rural Areas1

Abstract Many race-specific differences in health outcomes that have been observed in previous research have been attributed to class and racebased group differences which either facilitate or constrain health opportunities and behaviors. These include such variables as different rates of poverty, health insurance coverage, and access to medical care. However, these relationships have been inadequately examined in rural communities where minority status may be even more detrimental to health than in urban areas, due to various constraints on access to health care. We present an analysis that assesses the effects of community, family structure, sociodemographic, and medical care variables on self-reported health status among Hispanics, Mrican Americans, and non-Hispanic whites in six rural communities in Florida. Community structural characteristics had a significant effect on self-reported health, as did some of the measures of how respondents “experience” community. These relationships held even when other sets of variables were added to the models. Family/household characteristics and sociodemographic and medical care variables were less important in explaining self-reported health status. These findings suggest that community continues to be important in explaining differences in health status in rural areas.     

Calculating the total vote where the district magnitude is greater than one: A test of some algorithms using British local election data

Electoral analysis using aggregate data relies on the availability of accurate voting statistics. One vital piece of information, often missing from official electoral returns, particularly British local government elections, is the total number of valid ballot papers. This figure is essential for the calculation of electoral turnout. When voters have a single vote and official information about the number of ballot papers issued is missing, a figure for the total vote can still be derived. However, local elections in Britain frequently use a system of multiple-member wards, where voters have as many votes as there are seats to be filled. In such cases, calculating the total vote and, hence, the turnout does present a real problem. It cannot be assumed that all voters will use their full quota of votes or that voters will cast a ballot in favour of a single party. This paper develops and tests diff erent algorithms for calculating the total vote in such circumstances. We conclude that the accuracy of an algorithm is closely related to the structure of party competition. The findings of this paper have a number of important implications. First, the difficulties in calculating the turnout in multiple-member wards are identified. This will inform the debate about public participation in the local electoral process. Second, the method for deriving a figure for the total vote has an important bearing on a number of other statistics widely employed in electoral analysis.     

Statistical Methods and Graphical Displays for Analyzing How the Association Between Two Qualitative Variables Differs Among Countries, Among Groups, Or Over Time: A Modified Regression-Type Approach

Many interesting sociological questions pertain to how the association between two variables depends on a third variable. In sociological applications, the third variable often pertains to countries, to subgroups of a population, or to time periods. We propose a regression-type approach that specifies that the log-odds- ratios that describe the two-way association of interest are a linear function of latent scores for the third variable. Additive and multiplicative models currently in use by researchers are special cases of the regression-type model. To illustrate the utility of the regression-type approach, we apply this approach to analyze (1) data on occupational mobility in the United States, Britain, and Japan (comparing mobility in these countries) and (2) data on the association between religion and voting behavior in U.S. presidential elections from 1968 to 1992 (comparing this association in the different elections). We also introduce here graphical displays that can be used to obtain worthwhile information about goodness-of-fit and to aid in substantive interpretation.