Reflections on the revolutionary wave in 2011

The “Arab Spring” was a surprising event not just because predicting revolutions is a difficult task, but because current theories of revolution are ill equipped to explain revolutionary waves where interactive causal mechanisms at different levels of analysis and interactions between the units of analysis predominate. To account for such dynamics, a multidimensional social science of revolution is required. Accordingly, a meta-framework for revolutionary theory that combines multiple levels of analysis, multiple units of analysis, and their interactions is offered. A structured example of theory building is then given by detailing how the development of world cultural models and practices challenge existing political structures, affect mobilization processes, and make diffusion more likely. A structured example of study design using qualitative comparative analysis of 16 Middle Eastern and North African countries provides support for the interaction of subnational conditions for mobilization, state-centered causes, and transnational factors, including a country’s linkage to world society, as one explanation of the Revolutions of 2011.     

SOS—Satisfied or Stuck,Why Older Rural Residents Stay Put: Aging in Place or Stuck in Place in Rural Utah*

As rural communities undergo substantial demographic and economic changes, understanding the migration intentions and their antecedents of rural elderly persons becomes increasingly important. Using data drawn from a survey of adults from 24 rural Utah communities conducted in 2008, we examine whether rural residents 60 years of age or older plan to remain in their present communities (N= 621). We use structural equation models (SEM) to estimate the relationships between a variety of individual and community-level background measures, including perceptions of local service quality, leaving one's community for health care, Internet use, attachment to and satisfaction with community, and plans to age in place. Results suggest that even as the rural context of economic decline, population loss, and distance to medical services may reduce the viability of staying in a community, a desire to remain in the community is primarily a function of perceptions of the quality of local services and community satisfaction. This research highlights the need to better understand the interplay between the availability of medical services and perceptions of distance as well as to understand the complex relationship between individual and community level characteristics for migration intentions.     

The Incidence of Crime on Industry‐Level Foreign Direct Investment: An Assessment of OECD Member Countries*

In this article, we assess whether the incidence of crime helps to explain the variation in sectoral FDI flows. Using a panel of 29 Organization of Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries for the period 2003–2012, we employ a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation strategy due to the potential for endogeneity between our variables of interest. Our results indicate that crime deters investment to the service sector. In particular, this effect is observed in the following service industry subsector: financial services. Policymakers interested in boosting FDI in the affected sectors should be concerned with policies that focus on the reduction of criminal activities.     

Bridge Leadership: Gendered Consumerism and Black Women’s Political Power within Early 20th Century “Don’t Buy” Campaigns

This research surveys the literature around black consumerism and social movements, exploring the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” (DBWYCW) campaigns of the 1920s-1940s. The author examines the integral roles women played (as organizers, agitators, and beneficiaries) in various economic boycotts within the context of Belinda Robnett’s theory of bridge leadership, with a particular focus on consumerism as a major vehicle through which African-American women engaged in movement work during the DBWYCW campaigns. This article challenges the erasure of women’s leadership by reframing “Don’t Buy” as a women’s movement. Applying Robnett’s bridge leadership theory to different eras, regions, and movements, we see how the Great Depression combined with activism in the gendered sphere of consumerism and facilitated the activism of black women. This paper also expands Robnett’s conceptualization of professional and indigenous bridge leaders by identifying urban working class women within the “Don’t Buy” movement who fit these leadership categories.     

Therapeutic Responses to Domestic Violence in Australia: A History of Controversies

This paper reviews controversies about domestic violence occurring in heterosexual relationships discussed in the Australian context by practitioners and academics and published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy over the past three decades. Controversies arose in relation to the provision of therapeutic interventions for domestic violence, primarily in individual and couple counselling and group programs. After a literature review, the following controversial issues are identified: (1) the role of patriarchy: Is a patriarchal culture the main cause of domestic violence? (2) Systemic family therapy and gendered violence: Does systemic family therapy hide men's responsibility for domestic violence? (3) Therapeutic and educational interventions for domestic violence: Does therapy turn a ‘crime’ into a ‘psychological problem’? (4) Men as victims: Do both men and women perpetrate domestic violence in equal measure? (5) It takes two to tango: What part do women play in eliciting men's violence?     

Who Gets Custody Now? Dramatic Changes in Children’s Living Arrangements After Divorce

This article reexamines the living arrangements of children following their parents’ divorce, using Wisconsin Court Records, updating an analysis that showed relatively small but significant increases in shared custody in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These changes have accelerated markedly in the intervening years: between 1988 and 2008, the proportion of mothers granted sole physical custody fell substantially, the proportion of parents sharing custody increased dramatically, and father–sole custody remained relatively stable. We explore changes in the correlates of alternative custody outcomes, showing that some results from the earlier analysis still hold (for example, cases with higher total family income are more likely to have shared custody), but other differences have lessened (shared-custody cases have become less distinctive as they have become more common). Despite the considerable changes in marriage and divorce patterns over this period, we do not find strong evidence that the changes in custody are related to changes in the characteristics of families experiencing a divorce; rather, changes in custody may be the result of changes in social norms and the process by which custody is determined.     

“Tell Me So That I Can Help You”: Private Information and Privacy Coordination Issues in the Context of Eldercare

In order to provide competent care to aging parents, adult children, and older parents must renegotiate long-standing privacy boundaries that allow caregivers access to parents’ private information. It is reasonable to surmise that caregivers encounter privacy coordination issues when attempting to care for their aging parent. This study utilizes Communication Privacy Management theory to explore what content is considered private and what privacy coordination issues arise in the context of eldercare. Results from 27 in-depth interviews with adult children caring for an aging parent suggest that information concerning parents’ future care, health and well-being, and (in)capabilities were marked private. The findings also detail three disruptions to privacy coordination, including parental caregivers’ ambivalence toward managing parents’ care-related information. Critical implications of the study are discussed, which include how privacy turbulence may be a functional catalyst for boundary recalibration.     

The prospectus of activism: discerning and delimiting imagined possibility

This article aims to articulate a new agenda in the scholarship of social movements. Specifically, it seeks to turn attention to the assumptions that undergird activism. Rather than studying movements themselves, we can study them as the embodiment of collective expectation in a particular public. We can learn more about the broader society in which movements are embedded by asking how activists and the public they seek to engage determine what is within the realm of possibility. I refer to the imagined horizon of possibility as the activist prospectus. To illustrate the importance of prospectus, I draw upon a case study of environmental activism in Samara, Russia. Ethnographic observation and analysis yield insights into subjective perceptions that help explain the weakness of civil society within Russia.     

The Value of Information in Decision‐Analytic Modeling for Malaria Vector Control in East Africa

Decision analysis tools and mathematical modeling are increasingly emphasized in malaria control programs worldwide to improve resource allocation and address ongoing challenges with sustainability. However, such tools require substantial scientific evidence, which is costly to acquire. The value of information (VOI) has been proposed as a metric for gauging the value of reduced model uncertainty. We apply this concept to an evidenced‐based Malaria Decision Analysis Support Tool (MDAST) designed for application in East Africa. In developing MDAST, substantial gaps in the scientific evidence base were identified regarding insecticide resistance in malaria vector control and the effectiveness of alternative mosquito control approaches, including larviciding. We identify four entomological parameters in the model (two for insecticide resistance and two for larviciding) that involve high levels of uncertainty and to which outputs in MDAST are sensitive. We estimate and compare a VOI for combinations of these parameters in evaluating three policy alternatives relative to a status quo policy. We find having perfect information on the uncertain parameters could improve program net benefits by up to 5–21%, with the highest VOI associated with jointly eliminating uncertainty about reproductive speed of malaria‐transmitting mosquitoes and initial efficacy of larviciding at reducing the emergence of new adult mosquitoes. Future research on parameter uncertainty in decision analysis of malaria control policy should investigate the VOI with respect to other aspects of malaria transmission (such as antimalarial resistance), the costs of reducing uncertainty in these parameters, and the extent to which imperfect information about these parameters can improve payoffs.