Differences in Internalizing Symptoms Anticipate Adolescent Friendship Dissolution

This study examined the degree to which internalizing symptoms predict adolescent friendship instability. A total of 397 adolescents identified 499 same‐sex reciprocated friendships that originated in the seventh grade (M = 13.18 years). Discrete‐time survival analyses were conducted with Grade 7 peer, teacher, and self‐reports of internalizing symptoms as predictors of friendship dissolution across Grades 8–12. Differences between friends in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and (for boys only) submissiveness predicted subsequent friendship dissolution. Individual levels of these variables did not predict friendship dissolution, even at extreme or clinical levels. The findings suggest that friendship instability arising from internalizing problems stems from dissimilarity between friends rather than the presence of psychopathological symptoms on the part of one friend.     

The evolution of Rare Pride: Using evaluation to drive adaptive management in a biodiversity conservation organization

Rare Pride is a social marketing program that stimulates human behavior change in order to promote biodiversity conservation in critically threatened regions in developing countries. A series of formal evaluation studies, networking strategies, and evaluative inquiries have driven a 20-year process of adaptive management that has resulted in extensive programmatic changes within Pride. This paper describes the types of evaluation that Rare used to drive adaptive management and the changes it caused in Pride's theory-of-change and programmatic structure. We argue that (a) qualitative data gathered from partners and staff through structured interviews is most effective at identifying problems with current programs and procedures, (b) networking with other organizations is the most effective strategy for learning of new management strategies, and (c) quantitative data gathered through surveys is effective at measuring program impact and quality. Adaptive management has allowed Rare to increase its Pride program from implementing about two campaigns per year in 2001 to more than 40 per year in 2009 while improving program quality and maintaining program impact.     

Precarious in Piraeus: on the making of labour insecurity in a port concession

ABSTRACT

Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by COSCO’s subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminals (PCT). By contrasting the threatened unionized labour regime at OLP with the highly precarious labour conditions at PCT, the paper asks how the operative dimensions of capital condition precarity’s intensification and spread. In this light, precarity emerges not simply as a form of labour insecurity or an unevenly shared condition of human vulnerability but as a relational nexus that links questions of political economy to matters of subjectivity, space, power, and governance.     

Options traders exhibit subadditive decision weights

Professional options traders priced risky prospects as well as uncertain prospects whose outcomes depended on future values of various stocks. The prices of the risky prospects coincided with their expected value, but the prices of the uncertain prospects violated expected utility theory. An event had greater impact on prices when it turned an impossibility into a possibility or a possibility into a certainty than when it merely made a possibility more or less likely, as predicted by prospect theory. This phenomenon is attributed to the subadditivity of judged probabilities.     

Narrative and its potential contribution to disability studies

This article seeks to expand our understanding of narrative and the analysis of stories researchers invite and collect in the domain of disability studies. What narrative inquiry is and various reasons why researchers might opt to choose to turn to narratives are highlighted. Painting with broad strokes, narrative analysis is then considered before a typology of different ways in which stories can be analysed is offered. Illuminated by the typology are two contrasting standpoints on narrative analysis (storyteller and story analyst) and three specific methods (structural, performative, and autoethnographic creative analytic practices) that each standpoint might use to analyse the whats and hows of stories. The article closes by suggesting that researchers might consider using a variety of analyses in order to assist us to understand the complexities of the social world in diverse ways.     

Carbon metabolism: Global capitalism,climate change,and the biospheric rift

There is widespread agreement in the natural sciences that observed increases in average global temperatures over the past century are due in large part to the anthropogenic (human generated) emission of greenhouse gases, primarily stemming from fossil fuel combustion and land use changes (e.g., deforestation). Many social processes have been identified for their contribution to climate change. However, few theoretical approaches have been used to study systematically the relations of the social with the biosphere. Our goal is to illustrate how the theory of metabolic rift provides a powerful approach for understanding human influence on the carbon cycle and global climate change. We extend the discussions of metabolism (the relationship of exchange between nature and humans) and metabolic rift to the biosphere in general and to the carbon cycle in particular. We situate our discussion of the metabolic rift in the historical context of an expanding, global capitalist system that largely influences the organization of human interactions with the environment. The general properties of a metabolic rift between nature and society include the disruption or interruption of natural processes and cycles, the accumulation of waste, and environmental degradation. Due to capitalism's inherent expansionary tendencies, technological development serves to escalate commodity production, which necessitates the burning of fossil fuels to power the machinery of production. As this process unfolded historically, it served to flood carbon sinks and generate an accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Technological “improvements” have actually increased the amount of resources used, since expansion in production typically outstrips gains in efficiency – a situation known as the Jevons paradox. The theory of the metabolic rift reveals how capital contributes to the systematic degradation of the biosphere.     

Private Prisons in Public Discourse: Measuring Moral Legitimacy

New policies require legitimacy to survive. Prison privatization represents a policy challenged by initial perceptions of illegitimacy. In the 1980s, governments began to allow private firms to run correctional facilities, shifting an inherently coercive, traditionally governmental function—incarceration—to the private sector. With data from 706 articles in four major American newspapers spanning 24 years, this research uses Freudenburg and Alario’s concept of diversionary reframing to measure and track the moral legitimacy of prison privatization across time and place. Findings suggest that initially high levels of moral legitimacy facilitated some states’ adoption of private prisons, while initially low levels of moral legitimacy stunted the growth of privatization in other states. This study presents a novel way of measuring moral legitimacy, demonstrates how the concept may be used to help explain controversial public policy changes, and documents the cultural content of private prison debates in the United States.