Marital Status,Gender, and Parents’ Psychological Well‐Being*

This study analyzes the associations between marital status, gender, and depressive symptoms among parents. The regression results indicate that married parents report fewer traditional depressive symptoms and lower rates of alcohol abuse than do single parents. Mothers and fathers also appear to be more likely to exhibit different depressive symptoms: Mothers are more likely than fathers to report traditional depressive symptoms and fathers are more likely to report the abuse of alcohol. Finally, we find evidence that indicators of parenting burdens such as economic strain, household labor, childcare, social support, and religious involvement mediate and moderate these relationships.     

Flexible Threshold Models for Modelling Interest Rate Volatility

This paper focuses on interest rate models with regime switching and extends previous nonlinear threshold models by relaxing the assumption of a fixed number of regimes. Instead we suggest automatic model determination through Bayesian inference via the reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Moreover, we allow the thresholds in the volatility to be driven not only by the interest rate but also by other economic factors. We illustrate our methodology by applying it to interest rates and other economic factors of the American economy.     

Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.     

Working around the Barriers to Creating and Sharing Knowledge in Capital Goods Projects: the Client's Perspective*

The article considers knowledge management issues from the client's perspective. In the example presented, a sludge treatment centre procured by Northumbrian Water Ltd (NWL), the task faced by the client was to manage knowledge in a context where the core technology being procured was new and resulted in the need for new knowledge to be created and shared both pre‐ and post‐delivery. In exploring these issues, the article reveals the problems of (and some solutions to) managing knowledge across the project life‐cycle and between different groups, where the motivation for generating and sharing knowledge was not the same for all participants.     

EXACT P‐VALUES FOR DISCRETE MODELS OBTAINED BY ESTIMATION AND MAXIMIZATION

In constructing exact tests from discrete data, one must deal with the possible dependence of the P‐value on nuisance parameter(s) ψ as well as the discreteness of the sample space. A classical but heavy‐handed approach is to maximize over ψ. We prove what has previously been understood informally, namely that maximization produces the unique and smallest possible P‐value subject to the ordering induced by the underlying test statistic and test validity. On the other hand, allowing for the worst case will be more attractive when the P‐value is less dependent on ψ. We investigate the extent to which estimating ψ under the null reduces this dependence. An approach somewhere between full maximization and estimation is partial maximization, with appropriate penalty, as introduced by Berger & Boos (1994, P values maximized over a confidence set for the nuisance parameter. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 89 , 1012–1016). It is argued that estimation followed by maximization is an attractive, but computationally more demanding, alternative to partial maximization. We illustrate the ideas on a range of low‐dimensional but important examples for which the alternative methods can be investigated completely numerically.     

Current Issues in Alternative Media Research

Research in alternative media has burgeoned since the turn of the millennium. The majority of studies has examined the political and social dimensions of alternative media and has focused on the media of social movements. The value of these amateur media projects lies not only in the content they produce, but also in the educational and political empowerment they offer to their participants. Other forms of alternative media, such as blogs and fanzines, present challenges to mainstream journalism; they challenge the exclusive authority and expertise of professional journalists. Recent research has begun to examine the relationship between alternative and mainstream media practices, particularly examining how alternative media offer ways of rebalancing media power and how 'ordinary' people are able to represent their own lives and experiences and concerns in ways that are often ignored or marginalised by the dominant media institutions. However, we need to learn more about specific alternative media practices and how audiences use their content.     

Understanding 2016: China,Brexit and Trump in the history of uneven and combined development

This article uses the theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD) to produce a novel explanation of ‘Brexit and Trump’ – the two shock political events of 2016. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we identify the global conjuncture of historical unevenness in which the votes occurred: how the neoliberal transformation of the advanced capitalist countries was synchronized with the radically different process of primitive accumulation in China. Second, we apply the theory of U&CD to this peculiar ‘simultaneity of the non‐simultaneous’: the ‘big country’ effects of China's industrialization, we find, were thrice multiplied by its combination with the advanced sectors of the world economy, which accelerated China's take‐off, brought forward its export phase, and widened its export profile at a moment of maximum openness in international trade. Finally, this produced the pattern of development that led to the events of 2016: the resultant trade shocks intensified the internal inequalities of British and American societies in ways that match the geography of the Leave and Trump votes. The analysis has a wider intellectual implication too, for the phenomena of historical unevenness and combination are intrinsic to the history of the global political economy; and the theory of U&CD therefore has a unique contribution to make to the field of International Political Economy.     

Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment,intoxication and collective life

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism.     

The Masculine Sociology of Prison Escapes and Inmate Recapture: Exploring the Discursive Representation of Prison Escapes in Scotland c. 1941 ‐ 1978

This paper theorises historical prison escapes by male prisoners from Scottish prisons, arguing that they represent a form of hegemonic masculinity. That dominant masculinity parallels recapture narratives constructed by the official masculinity associated with military service and its transfer to the prison ethos. Manly soldiering cultivated in prison officers with previous military service suited them to security duties. Violence, cunning, determination and athleticism is reflected in the escape bids, and human needs. These escapes occurred before electronic technology secured prison estates, so the strength and vigilance of the prison officers was essential. The sociology of escapes and the prison community literature underpins the paper's narrative analysis. It is concluded that escape data offers opportunities to understand the material nature of escape processes, and the representation of masculinity as reflected through accounts of technologies implemented in escapes, as well as to how the state represents prison escapes. By connecting masculinity to prison escape processes, a conceptual bridge is created between prison culture and concepts of masculinity. The latter, it is argued, are represented in narrative depictions of escapes. Escape narratives teach us about material forms of legal violence and embrace a tacit recognition of heterosexual manliness.     

Multivariate Stochastic Volatility Models with Correlated Errors

We develop a Bayesian approach for parsimoniously estimating the correlation structure of the errors in a multivariate stochastic volatility model. Since the number of parameters in the joint correlation matrix of the return and volatility errors is potentially very large, we impose a prior that allows the off-diagonal elements of the inverse of the correlation matrix to be identically zero. The model is estimated using a Markov chain simulation method that samples from the posterior distribution of the volatilities and parameters. We illustrate the approach using both simulated and real examples. In the real examples, the method is applied to equities at three levels of aggregation: returns for firms within the same industry, returns for different industries, and returns aggregated at the index level. We find pronounced correlation effects only at the highest level of aggregation.