The Dark Side of the Force: A Case Study of Restructuring and Social Capital1

Abstract This paper uses a case study of a Southern textile community to show how a distinct form of social capital is embedded in local networks of power and domination. Textile firms and communities in the South have undergone restructuring: technology and labor processes have modernized, firms have merged, consolidated, or closed, and the number of workers has declined. An analysis of Cannon Mills and its associated mill community of Kannapolis identifies the sources of the paternalist form of social capital that dominated work and community social relations. Corporate mergers, downsizing, technological change, shifts in the labor market, municipal incorporation, and labor organizing contributed to the transformation and decline of paternalistic social capital. The case study reminds social scientists that social capital is a context dependent form of power that can be created, accumulated, or destroyed. While many current analyses treat social capital as an unquestioned positive force, the case study reveals the dark side of social capital.     

Responsive Survey Design,Demographic Data Collection,and Models of Demographic Behavior

To address declining response rates and rising data-collection costs, survey methodologists have devised new techniques for using process data (“paradata”) to address nonresponse by altering the survey design dynamically during data collection. We investigate the substantive consequences of responsive survey design—tools that use paradata to improve the representative qualities of surveys and control costs. By improving representation of reluctant respondents, responsive design can change our understanding of the topic being studied. Using the National Survey of Family Growth Cycle 6, we illustrate how responsive survey design can shape both demographic estimates and models of demographic behaviors based on survey data. By juxtaposing measures from regular and responsive data collection phases, we document how special efforts to interview reluctant respondents may affect demographic estimates. Results demonstrate the potential of responsive survey design to change the quality of demographic research based on survey data.     

Learning about a child's gay or lesbian sexual orientation: parental concerns about societal rejection, loss of loved ones, and child well being

This article reports the results of a study examining heterosexual parents' concerns upon learning about their children's gay or lesbian sexual orientations. Three areas of parental concern are noted: (a) those about what society thinks of them because they have gay or lesbian children, (b) those about being rejected by loved ones, and (c) concerns for their child's physical and psychological well being. Results indicate that parents' concerns about having gay or lesbian children differ depending on the gender of the parent, gender of the child, awareness of stigma, and perceptions of parents' own gender role attributes.     

Merton’s Sociology 215-216 Course

For many years, Robert K. Merton taught a famous, year-long graduate course at Columbia called The Analysis of Social Structures. His lectures have been recalled for their dazzling intellectual effects by those who took the course, but none of these former students has described what Merton actually said in specific lectures. I do this now, using my extensive lecture notes from 1952–53 when I took it for credit, and from later years when I sat in on the course. The core of the course at that time was Merton’s Paradigm for Functional Analysis in Sociology. Each concept in the paradigm—subjective dispositions, objective consequences, functional requirements, structural constraints, etc.—was elaborated in its relationship to a wide variety of sociological problems in the published theoretical and empirical literature. I also recount how Merton’s relationship to Talcott Parsons appeared to us in the course.     

Six‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants Discriminate Between Goals Despite Similar Action Patterns

Behne, Carpenter, Call, and Tomasello (2005) showed that 9‐ to 18‐month‐olds, but not 6‐month‐olds, differentiated between people who were unwilling and unable to share toys. As the outcome of the two tasks is the same (i.e., the toy is not shared), the infants must respond to the different goals of the actor. However, visual habituation paradigms have shown an earlier onset of goal awareness. The present study reconciles this disparity by replicating the findings of Behne et al. with both 6‐ and 9‐month‐olds, using similar tasks and additional response measures.     

Promoting Children's Welfare by Inter‐professional Practice and Learning in Social Work and Primary Care

Social work in the United Kingdom is an activity that benefits from, and often requires, co‐operation between different staff and across different professions. How this is to be achieved has been a central dilemma for practice and policy for many years. Primary care health services often play a key role. New policy and practice developments are designed to promote inter‐professional working with children, where research has shown significant problems in the community‐based health care of looked after children, children leaving care, and children at serious risk. There is, however, little evidence from research that supports current developments in inter‐professional practice; analysis of the particular nature of the inter‐professional problems is lacking, as are therefore the relevant inter‐professional solutions. A framework for better analysis, linked to developments in practice‐based research, one that would yield significant improvements for children's welfare, is presented here.     

Managing Contradiction: Stockholder and Stakeholder Views of the Firm as Paradoxical Opportunity

Stockholder and stakeholder perspectives have been positioned in the literature as being in tension, and thus a potential source of innovation and change. However, researchers have overlooked a systematic examination of this presumption in theory and in practice. This study explores the ways that stockholder and stakeholder assumptions are presented by theorists and compares these with expressions of stockholder and stakeholder perspectives used by firms in practice. We argue that theoretical entrenchment dichotomizing these perspectives has disrupted the ability of researchers to leverage this tension. While scholarship remains trapped in a vicious cycle, we also argue that firms in practice express only the acceptance dimension of a virtuous cycle. Our empirical research demonstrates that firms accept and accommodate the paradoxical tension between managing for stockholders versus balancing the interests of stakeholders. This is evidenced by strategies we identify as book‐ending, cadence, continuous and simultaneous co‐mingling, and hybridization. We find that in practice these tensions are more integrated whereas in theory they are treated as more distinct and, often, in conflict. We suggest ways in which both scholarship and practice can better leverage tension as paradoxical opportunity.     

Learning by doing: the case of administrative policy transfer in China

This article explores of the role of policy transfer in facilitating the rise and consolidation of the ‘Reform and Open Door Policy' in China. It builds upon the seminal Dolowitz and Marsh [Dolowitz, D., and D. Marsh. 1996. “Who Learns What From Whom: A Review of the Policy Transfer Literature.” Political Studies 44: 343–357; Dolowitz, D., and D. Marsh. 2000. “Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy-Making.” Governance 13 (1): 5–23] framework to provide an examination of processes of administrative policy transfer which it argues are broadly indicative of the dynamics of change underpinning the incremental process of reform. It is observed that the reforms under study have not been characterized by rational policy design underpinned by evidence-based policy-making in which issues of cultural assimilation were emphasized. Rather, the implementation process itself has been used to affect processes of adaptation. Policy transfer in China can best be described as learning by doing.     

A general threshold stress hybrid hazard model for lifetime data

In this paper we propose a hybrid hazard regression model with threshold stress which includes the proportional hazards and the accelerated failure time models as particular cases. To express the behavior of lifetimes the generalized-gamma distribution is assumed and an inverse power law model with a threshold stress is considered. For parameter estimation we develop a sampling-based posterior inference procedure based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques. We assume proper but vague priors for the parameters of interest. A simulation study investigates the frequentist properties of the proposed estimators obtained under the assumption of vague priors. Further, some discussions on model selection criteria are given. The methodology is illustrated on simulated and real lifetime data set.