The Volunteer Satisfaction Index: A Validation Study in the Cultural Context of the Two European Titles—Youth 2019 and Culture 2021, Novi Sad,Serbia

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Conducting a study on a sample of 303 participants from the Novi Sad Voluntary Service we set out to validate the...     

Social Responsibility,Substance Use,and Sexual Risk Behavior in Men Who Have Sex With Men

Considerable public health literature focuses on relationships between problematic human characteristics (e.g., psychopathology) and unhealthy behaviors. A recent movement termed positive psychology emphasizes the advantages of assessing relationships between human strengths (e.g., altruism) and beneficial health behaviors. The present study assessed social responsibility, an orientation to help or protect others even when there is nothing to be gained as an individual, and its relationship to HIV-relevant behaviors. In our sample of 350 men who have sex with men (MSM), social responsibility was negatively correlated with substance use and HIV risk behaviors. Men who had been tested for HIV and knew their HIV status—a behavior that helps men protect their partners but does not protect themselves from the virus—also scored higher in social responsibility. Interventions designed to reduce HIV risk behavior in MSM may benefit from efforts to promote human strengths.     

Joint Beliefs in Conflictual Coordination Games

The traditional solution concept for noncooperative game theory is the Nash equilibrium, which contains an implicit assumption that players probability distributions satisfy t probabilistic independence. However, in games with more than two players, relaxing this assumption results in a more general equilibrium concept based on joint beliefs (Vanderschraaf, 1995). This article explores the implications of this joint-beliefs equilibrium concept for two kinds of conflictual coordination games: crisis bargaining and public goods provision. We find that, using updating consistent with Bayes rule, players beliefs converge to equilibria in joint beliefs which do not satisfy probabilistic independence. In addition, joint beliefs greatly expand the set of mixed equilibria. On the face of it, allowing for joint beliefs might be expected to increase the prospects for coordination. However, we show that if players use joint beliefs, which may be more likely as the number of players increases, then the prospects for coordination in these games declines vis-à-vis independent beliefs.     

Cultural Sociology and Other Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity in the Cultural Sciences

The subject of this article is the relationship between cultural sociology and approaches to culture in other social science disciplines. What are the characteristics of the theoretical environment, in which cultural sociology is operating? The article begins by reviewing the literature on interdisciplinarity. Many authors argue that interdisciplinarity is increasing or should be increasing, but the general consensus is that disciplinary isolation is the norm. From this perspective, the relationships between disciplines can be understood in terms of trading zones, in which fields in different disciplines have little in common, theoretically, or empirically. Interdisciplinary communication in ‘trading zones’ requires that participants laboriously construct a set of terms that permits them to exchange ideas. Alternatively, I propose that clusters of fields in different disciplines are linked by free-floating paradigms. Participants in disciplines that share ‘free-floating paradigms’ are able to communicate with one another more readily. The article presents evidence for the second interpretation, drawn from survey articles in disciplinary handbooks. Disciplines and fields in which the study of culture draws from the same pool of paradigms and models and shares a set of lines of inquiry with cultural sociology include traditional disciplines, such as anthropology, communication, geography, history and psychology, and interdisciplinary fields, such as cultural studies, communication, feminist theory, material culture, science studies, and visual culture. Interdisciplinary fields – particularly cultural studies – perform an important role in diffusing paradigms across disciplinary boundaries. Free-floating paradigms are associated with the work of major theorists, such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Clifford Geertz, Bruno Latour, Adorno, Gramsci, and Habermas.     

‘Belonging’ and ‘Otherness’: Sex Equality in Banking in Turkey and Britain

The struggle for sex equality at work has largely been achieved in the developed world, it is claimed. The number of well‐qualified young women entering white‐collar employment and achieving promotion to first‐line and middle management positions now matches or exceeds their male peers. Many young women have high career aspirations and argue that sex discrimination no longer exists. However, this perception is over‐optimistic. Major sex inequalities persist at senior management level in the salaries and benefits offered to female and male staff and in access to certain favoured occupations and sectors of employment. Questionnaires, interviews and documentary evidence from three Turkish and six British banks and high street financial organizations showed that their claimed commitment to equal opportunities by sex was not matched by their practices. Members of managerial elites (who were almost exclusively male) held firm views about the characteristics of ‘the ideal worker’, which informed organizational ideologies, including human resource policies and practices concerning recruitment and promotion. They also permeated organizational cultures, which affected employees’ working practices and experiences. The outcome of these internal negotiation processes was to differentiate between a favoured group of staff seen as fully committed to the companies’ values, who were promoted and rewarded, and an ‘out’ group, whose members were denied these privileges. This distinction between ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ is gendered not only along the traditional lines of class, age, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability, but also along the new dimensions of marriage, networking, safety, mobility and space. Despite local and cross‐cultural differences in the significance of these factors, the cumulative disadvantage suffered by women staff seeking career development in the industry was remarkably similar.     

Multi-phase sampling under cost constraints

Multi-phase sampling (M-PhS) scheme is useful when the interest is in the estimation of the population mean of an expensive variable strictly connected with other cheaper (auxiliary) variables. The MSE is an accuracy measure of an estimator. Usually it decreases as the sample size increases. In practice the sample size cannot become arbitrarily large for possible cost constraints. From a practical point of view it would be useful to know the sample sizes which guarantee the best accuracy of the estimates for fixed costs. These “optimum” sample sizes can be, in some cases, computable but not admissible. In other cases, they can be neither admissible nor computable. The main goal of this paper is to propose a solution for both these situations. It will be clear that in both situations the solution is to consider a M-PhS scheme with one or more phases less.     

1984 and beyond: Divergent Directions and Extra Depth*

It is time family therapy looked wider than the therapy session. Problems presenting also need to be viewed within a societal context. The complexity and fluid nature of issues affecting the family today needs to be recognised. To highlight this, 3 divergent areas are discussed; family structure, culture, and the nuclear threat. The myth of homogeneity is exposed and the pluralistic nature of Australian society is discussed. It is argued that family therapists have a responsibility to be aware of, and to comment on, family policy issues if the approach is to continue to develop divergent directions and extra depths.     

Coming out at work: performativity and the recognition and renegotiation of identity

This paper is about ‘coming out’ and the process of disclosure and non‐disclosure of minority sexual identity in organizations. The process of ‘coming out’ is important for the individual lesbian or gay man since it is concerned with the discursive recognition and renegotiation of their identity. The study uses storytelling and a double narrative approach, where 92 individuals were interviewed to produce 15 stories of coming out, which were used for discussion in focus groups. The research took place within 6 organizations – 2 emergency services, the police and the fire service, 2 civil service departments and 2 banks. A conceptual framework is developed to explain the process of disclosure, showing it to be a continuing process rather than a single event. The concept of performativity is used to explain how in coming out the discursive practice and the telling of sexuality performs the act of coming out, making it an illocutionary speech act, and one which is made as an active or forced choice. The performative and perlocutionary speech acts interact with available subject positions thereby impacting on the individual's subjectivity. Sexuality is an under‐researched area of diversity in work organizations, as well as being one of the most difficult to research, so the level of access afforded by this research and the framework it produces provides a significant contribution to our understanding of minority sexual identity at work.