Two-Way Street. Moderne(n), Verwobenheit und Kolonialität

By reducing the multiplicity of paths to modernity to the cultural level and attributing Western Europe a key role in generating it, “multiple modernities” authors reinforced the modernizationist notion of an autonomous Western modernity that they themselves criticized. In turn, the post- and decolonial approaches of entangled modernities and modernity/coloniality make colonial ties an important factor in the explanation of global processes. The article first examines these approaches’ relationship to the model of multiple modernities in order to assess conceptual and theoretical similarities and differences between them. Second, the two approaches are considered against the background of their respective empirical reference—India for entangled modernities and Latin America for modernity/coloniality—and possibilities of a theoretical synthesis between them as a potential for South-South dialogue are explored.     

Polycentric structure and informal norms: competition and coordination within the scientific community

The success of the scientific community challenges in many ways our theories of social cooperation and public goods production. It is a very large-scale, decentralized, international organization lacking any central management or a formalized legislative or rule-enforcement body. Even the entry/exclusion rules are lax and unclear. By many standards it should not work. But, instead, it is one of the most successful human endeavors of all time. This paper provides an updated institutionalist theory of how this community works, with an extended discussion of its informal norms, prestige mechanisms, decentralized resource allocation, and interactions with states and civil society. Second, the paper discusses the ways in which the scientific community can fail at its truth-seeking task as a result of distortions created by outside political pressure and interactions with self-interested funding sources arguing that, as long as the polycentric structure is kept in place and the informal norms are preserved, the distortions are likely to be minor.     

Die Fallstricke der Bibliometrie

The bibliometric evaluation of sociology departments conducted by Litzenberger und Sternberg provides an instructive example of the dangers hidden in the application of bibliometric methods. According to the state of bibliometric art, the methodology proposed by Litzenberger and Sternberg is not applicable for fundamental reasons. The discussion of some technical problems highlights the difficulties of using the standard instruments offered by the Institute of Scientific Information.     

Care-full failure: how auxiliary assistance to poor Roma migrant women in Spain compounds marginalization

ABSTRACT

In Spain, the national and local authorities boast in recent years about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic integration into the waged labor market is considered a major goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for entire families. This article argues that integration programs adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The performance of Roma as the subject–object of these programs is carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’, ‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with ‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively ‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families and about women in particular.     

The Skew-Normal Distribution on the Simplex

Density functions on the simplex defined with respect to the Lebesgue measure can change from unimodality to multimodality with perturbation. This phenomenon is induced by the incompatibility of the Aitchison geometry and the Lebesgue measure. A Lebesgue-type measure, compatible with the algebraic geometric structure of the simplex, is used here to define the skew-normal density on the simplex as the Radon-Nykodym derivative with respect to it. Similarities and differences between the densities obtained using the different measures are analyzed.     

Goodness-of-Fit Tests for the Skew-Normal Distribution When the Parameters Are Estimated from the Data

In this article, tests are developed which can be used to investigate the goodness-of-fit of the skew-normal distribution in the context most relevant to the data analyst, namely that in which the parameter values are unknown and are estimated from the data. We consider five test statistics chosen from the broad Cramér–von Mises and Kolmogorov–Smirnov families, based on measures of disparity between the distribution function of a fitted skew-normal population and the empirical distribution function. The sampling distributions of the proposed test statistics are approximated using Monte Carlo techniques and summarized in easy to use tabular form. We also present results obtained from simulation studies designed to explore the true size of the tests and their power against various asymmetric alternative distributions.     

The media construction of remittances and transnational social ties: migrant–non-migrant relationships in the Romanian press

The study explores through a ‘transnational lens’ the Romanian media construction of remitting practices and identities within a wider debate on circular migration. It uses a broad definition of remittances (financial, sociocultural and political) and is concerned with the role of the Romanian press in articulating migrant–non-migrant relationships and laying the ground for informed policy debates. The methodology consists of qualitative corpus analysis and discourse analysis applied to a corpus of 221 news articles. The main findings indicate an overall positive evaluation of remittances (with the main exception of family separation), which endows migrants with social recognition as development agents and is used to justify various policy initiatives, but at the same time disempowers them through instrumentalisation. Even though limited in scope, grassroots migrant–non-migrant interaction, combined with a critical journalistic stance in editorials, opens up an avenue towards negotiation and joint transnational actions.