Governmentality,self, and acting at a distance

This article deals with the way individuals translate governmental rationality into specific self-understandings in everyday life. Based on the case study of a state-run boarding school in Israel, the article draws a link between deliberate governmental intervention in the self-concept of ethnic subjects and the manner in which boarding-school graduates experience this intervention and their selfhood, years after their education in the boarding school. This deliberate governmental intervention is shown to be a form of pastoral power. The boarding school is presented as a voluntary organization acting to enhance the life opportunities of citizens described as ‘marginal’. Furthermore, governmental intervention encompasses organized and deliberate transformation of students’ ethnic identities. The interviews with boarding school graduates reveal that they do not experience their selfhood as one whole but rather as two simultaneous types of self: Eastern and Western. This type of selfhood maintains an antithetical relationship between its two components as well as a lasting attempt to discard one selfhood in favor of the other. The discussion section elucidates the internal logic at the heart of the relationship of the self to self and the meaning of the concept of ‘acting at a distance’ that is bound up with governmentality.     

Contemporary Youth Violence Prevention: Interpersonal-Cognitive Problem-Solving

ABSTRACT

Considerable progress has been made in the past decade in identifying which factors contribute to youth violence. The purpose of this article is to illuminate the issues and group factors that underlie youth violence, assessment and profiling, and prevention programs. Guidelines for predicting youth violence are presented and critiqued. School violence prevention programs, the role of SAMHSA, and interpersonal-cognitive problem-solving are presented.     

Swimming Pool Hygiene: Self-Monitoring,Task Clarification,and Performance Feedback Increase Lifeguard Cleaning Behaviors

The effects of task clarification, self-monitoring, and performance feedback on cleaning behaviors of 9 lifeguards in 3 performance areas (vacuuming, lobby tidying, and pool deck maintenance) were investigated using an ABA reversal design at a county swim complex. A specific task in each performance area was used as a behavioral control. Following a task clarification meeting, the percentage of closing tasks completed each night was self-monitored through ratings by lifeguards and managers. Researchers conducted independent ratings of these completed tasks after the staff had left the building. Feedback data were posted daily using line graphs that displayed the percentage of tasks completed correctly from both self-report and researchers' data. Overall performance increased from an average of 45.1% correct behaviors during baseline to an average of 76.9% during intervention then reversed to baseline during follow-up to an average performance of 45.05%.     

Local Banks Efficiency and Employment

Abstract. This work analyses the links between credit and labour markets highlighting the influence of credit market inefficiencies on employment. We argue that if banks are not efficient in monitoring the borrowers in the presence of asymmetric information, credit market imperfections have real effects. We estimate dynamic equations using system generalized method of moments (GMM) for bank loans and employment on panel data for Italian firms. The system GMM estimates indicate that the impact of credit market on employment is higher where the local financial market is less developed, asymmetric information is widespread, bank managers are less efficient in assessing the firms' solvency and do not use appropriate methods to evaluate the borrowers' payback capacity.     

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Midwest Social Workers: Where Do They Stand?

ABSTRACT

Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is explicitly legal in five states and by court decision in one. Legislative bills have been introduced in other states including Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. This quantitative study was designed to understand Midwest, hospice and palliative care at end-of-life social workers’ attitudes toward PAS, preferred terminology, perception of preparedness for the implementation, and awareness of PAS legislation in their state. Sixty-two social workers from Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin completed an anonymous online survey. The results indicated that over one-half of the participants supported PAS legislation and is consistent with previous research on social workers across the country. While there was a range of perceived preparedness for implementation, a majority felt moderately to very prepared. Professional and personal values as well as professional experience influenced their perceived preparedness. Few social workers had accurate awareness of PAS legislation in their state or had attended workshops/events for further education or as a policy advocate. To practice competently and advocate at all levels of practice, hospice and palliative care at end-of-life social workers’ need to understand their own attitudes and values toward PAS and pursue additional education around this ethical issue.     

Perpetuum Mobile: Substance, Force and the Sociology of Translation

Going after means taking up a position with regard to something and the active pursuit of that same thing. It is the critical move par excellence , but also an act of appropriation. This essay suspends the urge to go after in preference for an exploration of the trajectory of that body of texts known as the sociology of translation. The figure of the perpetuum mobile is put into circulation through these texts in order to trace some of their more unusual and unfamiliar connections. These include a whole series of parallels with seventeenth century classical philosophy and with nineteenth century 'social energetics'. Connections are drawn out by using three 'test signals', which are sent on through the ANT canon: substance, force and time. Pivotal to each is the sense of how very different events and apparently diverse territories can be brought into contiguity, or folded up together. This contiguity needs to be performed rather than described , placed in translation rather than simply presented . The chapter concludes by tracing a way from the strange folds of ANT to the equally peculiar forms of early Psychology.     

Feminism,Post-feminism,and Young Women’s Reactions to Lena Dunham’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Girls</Emphasis>

This article explores how women in a junior-level Women and Sexuality class taught at a large US research university make sense of the HBO television show Girls. Data come from essays written in spring 2013 by 28 students in response to the first three episodes of Girls. The students’ essays illustrate their ability to actively respond to the show’s portrayal of women’s lives in a nuanced rather than one-dimensional way. The most common topics in these essays were the show’s portrayal of male dominance in relationships, female sexual agency, female body disciplines, and the costs women pay for sexual activity. The essays illustrate how the students mobilize feminist and post-feminist frames, both singly and jointly, as well as the difficulties involved in trying to separate these frames from each other in either media texts or women’s lives. In addition, the data shed light on the struggles young women face in dealing with gendered expectations for sexuality, femininity, and body discipline in contemporary neoliberal society.     

Socio-economic factors and family size as determinants of marital dissolution in Italy

This is an analysis of marital dissolution in Italy, with a focus on the life events and socioeconomic factors that put individuals at high risk of a marital breakup. The author notes that Italian society still largely conforms to traditional conjugal models and attitudes toward cohabitation and divorce. "Women most exposed to the risk of marital disruption seem to be those who married very young, who have had no more than one child, who are better educated, who have full-time jobs and who reside in large towns in the north-west of Italy. In addition, a woman who cohabits with her partner before marrying him is more likely to separate than a woman entering marriage directly."     

Compulsive gambling and the law: From sin to vice to disease

The idea that compulsive gambling is a disease is in direct conflict with the dominant view in the law that gambling is a vice. Under the traditional view individuals who gamble to excess are morally weak and deserving of punishment. The recognition of pathological gambling as an official mental disease or disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 created an irreconcilable contention: American law never punishes an individual for being sick. The conflict can be seen in every area of the law and even between judges sitting in the same courtroom. The most dramatic disputes have been over the insanity defense; but, the disease argument has been raised, sometimes successfully, in other criminal cases, to mitigate sentencing, in attorney disbarments, tax cases, bankruptcies, divorces, personal injury claims, and, most significantly, in claims against casinos. The legal disputes will spread and become even more heated as the disease diagnosis becomes more generally accepted.