Brody always on my mind: the mental mapping of a Jewish city

Once overwhelmingly inhabited by Jews, the Austro-Galician border town of Brody, in present-day Western Ukraine, has retained an important place on Ashkenazi mental maps until today, even though scholarly studies on Brody are scarce. The present article tries to capture the elements that allowed Brody to inscribe itself so successfully in Jewish memory. Therefore, this paper analyses several lieux de mémoire underlining Brody's enduring perception as a town closely related to Jewish issues. These places, however, are not only physical spots in the cityscape, like the ruins of the synagogue and the cemetery, but also images of and texts about Brody. Whether intended or not, pictures and postcards also have an impact on how Brody has been remembered; and so do memory books, be they written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish or Ukrainian. This study argues that Brody appears on the mental maps of Eastern European Jewry as an amalgam of physical places, icons and texts linked to a multi-layered and multifaceted urban history     

Reverse interviewing: a white adoptive mother engaging with black birth mothers and vice versa

Abstract

Researcher reflexivity, meaning the revealing of the researcher’s assumptions and her position vis-à-vis those researched, has by now become commonplace. This article explores such issues in the context of a larger study of transnational adoption for which I conducted interviews with South African birth mothers as both a researcher/interviewer and an adoptive mother. Instead of seeking to eliminate researcher bias, I propose using it as data that could reveal novel aspects of the phenomenon under study. This article specifically explores the use of reverse interviewing, which in this case meant disclosing my double positionality and inviting the interviewees to ask me questions. It is not a matter of merely extracting information: the technique allows participants to air their concerns, and facilitates investigation of the researcher’s reactions to them. All this, in turn, carries implications with regard to how the study area is conceptualised.     

WIKIPEDIA

The decentralized participatory architecture of the Internet challenges traditional knowledge authorities and hierarchies. Questions arise about whether lay inclusion helps to ‘democratize’ knowledge formation or if existing hierarchies are re-enacted online. This article focuses on Wikipedia, a much-celebrated example which gives an in-depth picture of the process of knowledge production in an open environment. Drawing on insights from the sociology of knowledge, Wikipedia's talk pages are conceptualized as an arena where reality is socially constructed. Using grounded theory, this article examines the entry for the September 11 attacks and its related talk pages in the German Wikipedia. Numerous alternative interpretations (labeled as ‘conspiracy theories’) that fundamentally contradict the account of established knowledge authorities regarding this event have emerged. On the talk pages, these views collide, thereby serving as a useful case study to examine the role of experts and lay participants in the process of knowledge construction on Wikipedia. The study asks how the parties negotiate ‘what actually happened’ and which knowledges should be represented in the Wikipedia entry. The conflicting points of view overload the discursive capacity of the contributors. The community reacts by marginalizing opposing knowledge and protecting or immunizing the article against these disparate views. This is achieved by rigorously excluding knowledge which is not verified by external expert authorities. Therefore, in this case, lay participation did not lead to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted established hierarchies.     

Seasonal patterns in slot-machine gambling in Germany

Although several aspects of gambling have been thoroughly investigated, little is known about the effect of seasonality on gambling. This study investigated the seasonal patterns in slot-machine usage, based on a unique data set of slot-machine usage from a German gambling centre using time series analysis. Knowledge of seasonal slot-machine usage patterns provides useful insights for researchers, gambling centre managers and legal authorities. Slot-machine gambling activity appears to be highest in November, when poor weather is compounded with lack of entertainment activities and lowest in December, when ample entertainment possibilities may distract people from gambling. The estimated daily and weekly seasonal patterns support the self-control literature, which suggests that self-regulatory failures are more likely when people are more tired; after work, or late in the evening. The high variation in gambling during winter implies that the availability of alternative entertainment activities may have an important influence on slot-machine usage.     

Politicians and Social Movements: The Impact of Electoral Victory on Local,National, and Transnational Activism by Hmong Americans in Minneapolis–St. Paul

Political opportunity theory predicts that increased access to the political system benefits social movements by disadvantaged groups. To test this prediction, this paper evaluates the impact of two elected Hmong American officials on social movement campaigns in their community during their time in office. Content analysis of newspaper reports is used to (i) create a sample of nine local, national, and transnational social movement campaigns in the community; and (ii) determine in which of four possible ways the elected officials supported the campaigns: favorable media interviews, speeches at events, event organization, and legislation initiation. Only the two transnational campaigns which mobilized the entire community received all four types of support. The paper concludes that elected officials, even former activists from an ethnic minority community, carefully select the causes they will fully support. After electoral victory, social movements must still actively engage sympathetic politicians in order to turn an opening in the political system into actual access to power.     

Overcoming neoliberal globalization: social-ecological transformation from a Polanyian perspective and beyond

ABSTRACT

The ecological crisis has intensified in many respects. Prominent proposals to deal with the crisis are discussed under the header ‘sustainability transformations’ or even ‘Great Transformation’. We argue that most contributions suffer from a narrow analytical approach to transformation ignoring the largely unsustainable dynamics of global capitalism and the power relations involved in it. Thus, a ‘new critical orthodoxy’ of knowledge about transformation is emerging which runs the danger to contribute to a spatially and socially highly uneven green capitalism. This article claims that the current debate on social-ecological transformation can be enriched by a Polanyian understanding but also based on regulation theory. We distinguish between three types of transformation: incremental adaptation of the current institutional systems, institutional change in favour of a new ‘green’ phase of capitalism, and a post-capitalist great transformation that implies a profound structural change of the mode of production and living.     

Academic writing as autocommunication – the case of doctoral dissertations on CSR

In this article, we explore the self‐oriented rather than socially‐oriented reasons why a doctoral dissertation in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is written. We base our article on Yuri M. Lotman’s idea on autocommunication which we use as tool in analysing a group interview conducted with six doctoral students studying in the field of CSR. We suggest that autocommunicational aspects might play a much more important role in rationalized Western culture and science than is often realized, and our main thesis is that one essential reason for writing a doctoral dissertation in the field of CSR might be to communicate with oneself and that this even might contain a therapeutic dimension. Implications for students, supervisors and future research are discussed at the end of the article.     

Globalizing Consumption and the Deferral of a Politics of Consequence

The reform process doi moi (Engl.: renovation) in Vietnam has brought profound changes for the Vietnamese economy. Most notably the opening of a formerly centrally planned economy to the capitalist world market has made the country more accessible to foreign direct investment and integrated the country more strongly into the capitalist world system. Part of the overall modernisation and global integration strategy in Vietnam is the development of the Internet. However, the Internet in Vietnam is not a ubiquitous and widely available technology, rather it is a piece of infrastructure that is unevenly available across social and regional spaces. Aided by a regulatory environment that presents itself as providing opportunities for all, the Internet provides a business tool for a transnational capitalist class and its local affiliates to access the resources of Vietnam's periphery type economy. The Internet has contributed to a shift in economic control functions away from the state territorial level to a network of dispersed actors. The paper suggests close links between dependency and world-systems theories and Internet research and argues that the theories remain valid in their principle argument, but that the level of analysis needs to be shifted away from the state territorial unit to these dispersed sets of actors.

El proceso de reforma doi moi [renovación] en Vietnam ha traído profundos cambios a la economía vietnamita. Particularmente, la apertura de una economía de planificación anteriormente centralizada al mercado capitalista mundial, ha hecho al país más accesible a la inversión directa extranjera y lo ha integrado a un sistema capitalista mundial con mayor fuerza. En términos generales, parte de la estrategia de modernización e integración global en Vietnam es el desarrollo de la internet. Sin embargo, la internet en Vietnam no es una tecnología omnipresente y extensamente accesible, más bien es una pieza de infraestructura que se ofrece desigualmente a través de los espacios sociales y regionales. La internet provee un instrumento de negocios a la clase capitalista trasnacional y a sus afiliados locales, para tener acceso a los recursos de la economía de tipo periférico de Vietnam, ayudado por un medioambiente regulador que se presenta tal y como ofreciendo oportunidades para todos. La internet ha contribuido a un cambio en las funciones de control económicas, del nivel del estado territorial a una red de actores dispersos. El artículo sugiere enlaces estrechos entre las teorías de dependencia y de sistemas mundiales y la investigación de internet y sostiene que las teorías siguen válidas en su argumento de principio, pero que el nivel de análisis debe distanciarse de la unidad del estado territorial a esos grupos de actores dispersos.