Myths and Moral Authority in Maluku: The Case of Ambon

Since January 1999, the island of Ambon, located in the province of Maluku (Moluccas) in Eastern Indonesia, has been the scene of a virtual war between Christians and Muslims. Amid its religious underpinnings, two competing nationalistic ideologies have developed, one based on allegiance to an ethnic Moluccan nation and the other to a civic nation of common residence. Attempts to rationalise the underlying sentiment of the masses in these movements have purported rational explanations of the pursuit of common material interests, while others have focused on innate emotions of individual loyalty to their community. The other explanation suggests that identity is constructed as an ideological myth that convinces the individual of the simplicity of otherwise complex situations. In this respect, this paper has focused on the psychological and political appeal of myths of kinship as strengthening ideas of national consciousness and individual loyalty. It is asserted that the construction of new 'us' and 'them' visions of imagined community occur in the context of social, economic and political processes. These disruptive forces place individuals in stress situations and make them susceptible to these ideologies which offer simplistic diagnoses of complex social and political changes.     

Don't Screw the Crew: Exploring the Rules of Engagement in Organizational Romance

Thirty years ago sociological research began to discover what workplace romance might mean for the participants. Since then management research has tended to adopt a functionalist approach, using survey methods, or third‐party approaches to ask about company policy and negative consequences of workplace romance, warning of the dangers and consequences of romance and offering solutions for managers on how to deal with this potential problem. Drawing on the sexuality of organization and critical literature, and adopting a position of constructivist structuralism with a qualitative research method, this research looks at how the concept of workplace romance is defined and negotiated within a public‐house setting. It examines the ‘rules of engagement’, the personal experiences and views of both managers and workers, as well as first‐hand stories of workplace romance. Romance was conceptualized as ‘natural’ and something that could not be legislated for, where unwritten rules were defined but often ignored. However, the ‘rules of engagement’ emerged as favouring particular groups depending on gender, position in the hierarchy and sexual identity. Subjective value judgements are made, often resting on gendered assumptions of male and female behaviour.     

Tort claims for road accident compensation and social security in South Africa

The statutory scheme of road accident compensation in South Africa encapsulates both the common law of tort or delict and the residue of liability insurance principles. The absence of meaningful interaction between the road accident compensation scheme and the broader social security system raises significant challenges. There are dissonant responses to the targeted misfortune, provision of benefits, financing, choice of remedies and socioeconomic-political priorities selected by the South African government. It is argued that the current scheme should be identified as falling squarely within a state-funded and regulated scheme of comprehensive social protection.     

The Impact of Candidate Sex on Evaluations of Candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives*

Objectives. To examine how voters and the general public evaluate women candidates by examining ideological and issue‐based evaluations of women candidates for the House of Representatives. Methods. Data are drawn from the National Election Study for all U.S. House elections from 1990 to 2000. OLS and logistic regression models examining the role of candidate sex in evaluations are tested. Results. When evaluating Democratic candidates, people see them as more liberal and utilize more female issues in their evaluations when the candidate is a woman. For Republican candidates, candidate sex is much less likely to be related to how people evaluate them. Conclusion. The central role of party in public evaluations of women candidates suggests that the impact of candidate sex on voters is more complex than previous works have suggested.     

Employment motivations of farm spouses

In the study reported here, reasons for working off the farm and reasons for not working off the farm are examined as a function of gender and socioeconomic characteristics. Women are significantly less likely than men to work off the farm to supplement farm income, and significantly more likely to work off the farm for personal reasons. A logistic regression analysis finds that men, those employed fulltime off the farm, and those with lower household incomes are most likely to cite economic reasons for working off the farm. Men are nearly twice as likely as women to cite time constraints as the primary reason for not working off the farm, while only women cite family responsibilities. Logistic regression reveals that men, those with higher household incomes, and those with livestock operations are most likely to cite lack of time as the primary reason for not working off the farm.Patricia J. Wozniak is Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental Statistics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. Her research interests include family life and family economics, as well as the application of statistics to the social sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee.Kathleen K. Scholl is Senior Coordinator of the Economics Team of the Public Policy Institute at the American Association of Retired Persons, 1909 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20049. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University.     

Bayesian model selection for join point regression with application to age-adjusted cancer rates

Summary.  The method of Bayesian model selection for join point regression models is developed. Given a set of K +1 join point models M ₀,  M ₁, …,  M _K with 0, 1, …,  K join points respec-tively, the posterior distributions of the parameters and competing models M _k are computed by Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations. The Bayes information criterion BIC is used to select the model M _k with the smallest value of BIC as the best model. Another approach based on the Bayes factor selects the model M _k with the largest posterior probability as the best model when the prior distribution of M _k is discrete uniform. Both methods are applied to analyse the observed US cancer incidence rates for some selected cancer sites. The graphs of the join point models fitted to the data are produced by using the methods proposed and compared with the method of Kim and co-workers that is based on a series of permutation tests. The analyses show that the Bayes factor is sensitive to the prior specification of the variance σ ², and that the model which is selected by BIC fits the data as well as the model that is selected by the permutation test and has the advantage of producing the posterior distribution for the join points. The Bayesian join point model and model selection method that are presented here will be integrated in the National Cancer Institute's join point software ( http://www.srab.cancer.gov/joinpoint/ ) and will be available to the public.