Challenges in Development and Implementation of Health‐Risk‐Based Soil Quality Guidelines: Turkey's Experience

Management of contaminated sites is a critical environmental issue around the world due to the human health risk involved for many sites and scarcity of funding. Moreover, clean‐up costs of all contaminated sites to their background levels with existing engineering technologies may be financially infeasible and demand extended periods of operation time. Given these constraints, to achieve optimal utilization of available funds and prioritization of contaminated sites that need immediate attention, health‐risk‐based soil quality guidelines should be preferred over the traditional soil quality standards. For these reasons, traditional soil quality standards are being replaced by health‐risk‐based ones in many countries and in Turkey as well. The need for health‐risk‐based guidelines is clear, but developing these guidelines and implementation of them in contaminated site management is not a straightforward process. The goal of this study is to highlight the problems that are encountered at various stages of the development process of risk‐based soil quality guidelines for Turkey and how they are dealt with. Utilization of different definitions and methodologies at different countries, existence of inconsistent risk assessment tools, difficulties in accessing relevant documents and reports, and lack of specific data required for Turkey are among these problems. We believe that Turkey's experience may help other countries that are planning to develop health‐risk‐based guidelines achieve their goals in a more efficient manner.     

Social capital in the field of power: the case of Norway

This paper analyses social capital structures in the field of power, based on data from the Norwegian Power and Democracy Survey on elites. Separating between objectified, institutionalised, embodied, and inherited social capital, and inspired by Bourdieu's approach, we analyse the relations between social capital and the other forms of capital by way of specific multiple correspondence analysis and ascending hierarchical cluster analysis. First, we find that the level of institutionalised social capital varies from one fraction of the Norwegian elite to another. Secondly, the range of networks established through previous work experiences is related to field seniority. Thirdly, the positions of highest endogamy are situated in the religious field, and to a lesser extent, in the scientific field, and in the juridical field. Finally, the ‘core of the core’ is defined by actors who are strongly interconnected inside what is called ‘the tripartite system’, with a high level of multipositionality and intersectorial connections.     

Heterogeneous risk and time preferences

Assessing individuals’ time and risk preferences is crucial in domains such as health-related decisions (e.g., dieting, addictions), environmentally-friendly practices, and saving opportunities. We propose a new method to jointly elicit and estimate risk attitudes and intertemporal choices. We use a novel individual level estimation procedure based on a hierarchical Bayes methodology, which can integrate different functional forms for discounting and risk attitudes. This method provides individual level estimates, and allows us to explore the heterogeneity in the data. In addition, we report a negative correlation between risk and time preferences, implying that risk-seeking individuals are less patient and less willing to defer consumption.     

The Inquisitorial Trial of a Cross-Dressing Lesbian: Reactions and Responses to Female Homosexuality in 18th-Century Portugal

This article analyzes the inquisitorial trial of Maria Duran, a Catalan novice in the Dominican convent of Nossa Senhora do Paraíso in Portugal. Maria Duran was arrested by the Inquisition in 1741 and, after a lengthy trial, condemned in 1744 to a public lashing and exile. She was suspected of having made a pact with the Devil and was accused by many female witnesses of possessing a “secret penis” that she had allegedly used in her amorous relations with fellow nuns and novices. Her voluminous trial dossier offers a rare and fascinating documentary insight into the often extreme reactions that female homosexuality provoked from both men and women in early modern Portugal. Using the evidence offered by the 18th-century trial of Maria Duran, this article highlights female bewilderment when faced with female-on-female sexual violence and the difficulty that men (in this case, churchmen) had coming to terms with the existence of female homosexuality. It also discusses the case in light of the acts/identity debate among historians of the history of sexuality.     

Are time and money equally substitutable for all commodity groups in the household’s domestic production?

Review of Economics of the Household - This article uses time-use and household expenditure data to measure the substitutability between time and money within the Beckerian household production...     

Masculinity and Class in the Context of Dirty Work

Through an ethnographic study of ‘dirty work’ (refuse collection and street cleaning), this article explores how masculinity and class intersect — how, in a mutually constitutive sense, they produce attitudes and practices, strengths and vulnerabilities, which are shaped by shifting relations of privilege and power. We find resistance to class subordination through adherence to traditional forms of masculinity and through esteem‐enhancing social comparison (e.g., with women; with migrant workers). Men also mobilized powerful nostalgic themes around the loss of traditional jobs as well as trade union power. We argue that displays of masculine resilience in the face of devaluation are less indicative of a culture of masculine dominance but more an expression of vulnerability and social dislocation, serving both as a source of resistance whilst simultaneously reinforcing anchors of social disadvantage that characterize forms of dirty work. We suggest that combining social comparison with intersectionality can potentially highlight how categories of difference are strategically deployed in response to varied and unequally valued social positionalities.     

Parental transfers and the labor supply of children

To finance their personal consumption, children may rely on transfers in the form of pocket money made by their parents and on personal resources earned from labor market activities. In this paper that focuses on the interaction between these two sources of income, we consider a model of parental transfer where the child can choose his own income through labor supply. The parent commits to a transfer amount that the child takes as given. For our empirical analysis, we use a cross-sectional French survey that includes detailed information about pocket money from parents to schoolchildren. Using a maximum-likelihood method, we estimate a simultaneous-equations model and find that parental transfers do not significantly influence the child's labor supply.     

Beyond resistance: Exploring health managers’ propensity for participatory evaluation in a developing country

The evaluation of interventions is becoming increasing common and now often seeks to involve managers in the process. Such practical participatory evaluation (PPE) aims to increase the use of evaluation results through the participation of stakeholders. This study focuses on the propensity of health managers for PPE, as measured through the components of learning, working in groups, use of judgment and use of systematic methods. We interviewed 16 health managers to determine the meaning they ascribe to these four components in their practice in a developing country, Haïti. We found that learning was often informal and that all managers attached a negative meaning to the use of judgment. Working in groups was favored by all managers, while the health managers viewed the use of systematic methods differently than do evaluators. The administrative health managers generally ranked lower in propensity for PPE than did their clinical colleagues. Implications for the practice of evaluation are discussed in relation to the work styles exhibited by managers in everyday practice, the proactive repetition of actions, the control exercised by formal procedures, and the collective versus “solitary” image of one's environment of action.