It is not easy being green: increasing sustainable public procurement behaviour

To achieve greater sustainability, governments need to continuously adapt their purchasing activities to innovations in the market. Sustainable procurement is a decision-making process in which the decisions of procurers determine if the full potential of sustainable procurement is used. The decisions and thus behaviour of procurers are therefore crucial for the successfulness of sustainable procurement. According to organizational theory, commitment to change could influence this behaviour. Hence, in the study, we examined if commitment to implement sustainable procurement increases sustainable procurement behaviour by Dutch public procurers and what determines this commitment to implement sustainable procurement are. Our study shows first that both affective commitment to implement sustainable procurement and procedural justice increase sustainable procurement behaviour. In addition, the results show that commitment to change acts as a mechanism between fit with vision, ecological sustainability attitude, procedural justice and sustainable procurement behaviour.     

Monotonicity and Implementability

Consider an environment with a finite number of alternatives, and agents with private values and quasilinear utility functions. A domain of valuation functions for an agent is a monotonicity domain if every finite‐valued monotone randomized allocation rule defined on it is implementable in dominant strategies. We fully characterize the set of all monotonicity domains.     

What is new with old? What old age teaches us about inequality and stratification

Aging is remarkably unequal. Who survives to grow old in America and the circumstances they face once there reflect durable racial, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities that structure our lives from birth. Yet within the field of social stratification and mainstream sociology proper, examinations of the rapidly growing population of older Americans are often relegated to a “gerontological” periphery. This essay posits that the failure to place aging as a core concern in stratification and inequality is a missed opportunity. We argue for the importance of reintegrating studies on the stratification of aging and explain why such a move is necessary. Specifically, we posit that (a) examining the aging population is necessary for understanding American inequality because aging is an outcome that is ubiquitous yet highly stratified; (b) aging and being seen as “old” in a youth‐focused society are stratifying processes in their own right; and (c) later life provides for analytical comparisons that are illustrative of how key mechanisms of inequality structure and stratify. After examining insights provided by a new wave of research on the aging U.S. population, we revisit the implications for understanding inequality and stratification in a graying and unequal America.     

The Political Role of Social Work: Grasping the Momentum of Working Through Interorganizational Networks in Belgium

ABSTRACT

This article explores how social workers deal with the ambiguity that arises from their ability to transform the private needs of individuals into issues of public concern. It is argued that the current shift towards joined-up working, which is epitomized by the creation of interorganizational networks, could encourage new opportunities for social work. These horizontal and nonhierarchical forms of cooperation serve as platforms for debate to ensure regular discussions about the causes of and potential solutions to complex societal problems. This article relies on a case-study of bottom-up networks in two Belgian cities where social workers from various policy fields voluntarily joined forces to look after hard-to-reach groups of homeless people. The primary data were obtained from document analysis, semi-structured interviews with network participants, and direct observations of network meetings. These data were analyzed by conducting a directed content analysis. The examination shows that the joint creation of welfare services leads to substantial debates among social workers about the criteria which homeless people must meet in order to be provided with welfare services and primary care. The paper shows that despite being aware of differing viewpoints by their engagement in such debates, social workers are reluctant to challenge the dominant conceptualizations underlying their own day-to-day practices, and that this impacts on the potential to induce local policymakers to take further action with regard to reducing homelessness.     

Jealousy in sexually open marriages

One hundred twenty-five men and 125 women, all Dutch and mostly liberal middle-class, responded to a series of scales measuring present, past, and anticipated jealousy as well as a variety of variables thought to be correlated with jealousy. All respondents were or had been in a sexually open marriage in which one or both partners had had an extramarital involvement. Women were more jealous than men. A variety of negative and positive consequences of spouse's extramarital involvement are presented. Individual and marital variables such as self-esteem, age, emotional dependency, and marital satisfaction were only weakly related to jealousy if at all. Only two of four major perceived causes for the reduction of jealousy in the relationship were related to jealousy anticipated in future jealousy-provoking situations. The findings are discussed in connection with sex roles, the threats that trigger jealousy, and a theoretical model of jealousy presented elsewhere. Author's Note: The author thanks Gregory L. White for editorial assistance on this article.     

The Collective Model of Household Consumption: A Nonparametric Characterization

We provide a nonparametric characterization of a general collective model for household consumption, which includes externalities and public consumption. Next, we establish testable necessary and sufficient conditions for data consistency with collective rationality that only include observed price and quantity information. These conditions have a similar structure as the generalized axiom of revealed preference for the unitary model, which is convenient from a testing point of view. In addition, we derive the minimum number of goods and observations that enable the rejection of collectively rational household behavior.     

Probabilities as Similarity‐Weighted Frequencies

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are a similarity‐weighted average of the beliefs induced by each past case.     

Caged Morality: Moral Worlds,Subculture, and Stratification Among Middle-Class Cage-Fighters

Social scientists have long been concerned with how and why marginalized groups create and participate in subcultures. There has been significantly less work examining how those with access to conventional status and success participate in subcultures, often despite significant economic and social costs. The result has been lopsided theorizing that neglects much of the positive, affective, and moral appeal of subcultures at all levels of stratification. The participation of middle-class men and women in the rapidly growing world of cage-fighting speaks to this longstanding issue in the existing literature. We find these individuals participate in a sporting subculture that involves bodily, interpersonal, and professional sacrifices because they feel it gives them the ability to viscerally realize the widely shared American ideals that form the core components of their “moral world.” The subculture holds particular sway over its members because they feel that its ideals, status hierarchies, and daily practices more directly embody the deeply embedded principles of middle-class morality and habitus than other elements of their lives.