Crisis Rhetoric,Stigma Play: The Contested Status of Humanities Majors on an Elite University Campus

This article extends symbolic interactionist thought on authenticity and stigma allure into the context of higher education in the United States where the status of the humanities is contested. Our abductive analysis of twenty‐nine, semistructured interviews with undergraduates at an elite university reveals that selecting a humanities major has social costs. Yet the students who opt into these majors renegotiate ideologies, practices, and resources in ways that generate meaningful educational experiences. Navigating these problematic situations in which status is threatened enables the social production and personal aesthetic experience of authenticity. These findings add a new evidentiary basis to theory on stigma allure and, in doing so, demonstrate that when rhetorics of crisis collide with the late modern quest for authenticity voluntary stigma can become a powerful, if also unwieldy, resource.     

Adolescence and Youth among Displaced Ethiopians: A Case Study in Kaliti Camp

The effects of trauma on adolescent mental health were studied via ethnographic fieldwork and the application of psychological testing. A random sampling of 108 war-traumatized subjects (68 male and 40 female) was given the Trauma Event subscale of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire and the Symptom Check List 90-Revised. More than 90% of the sample lost their property, 70% suffered extreme thirst, and more than a third witnessed death. They had all been living for the past six years in an extremely poor camp for the displaced. Yet, the psychopathology of the group was considerably less than expected. The authors attributed this to the adolescents' appraisal of the particular circumstances of their lives. They compared their poverty with other Ethiopians, and they compared their relative freedom given to them by their community with the adolescence of their parents and of other Ethiopians. The openness of the community in allowing adolescents to live outside of traditional norms was particularly salient for the females. The authors concluded that situational and circumstantial factors must be considered in assessing the mental health of war-traumatized adolescents.     

Organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior

In this research note, we examine the relationship between organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior in a global sample of 165 nonprofit organizations operating in a single, rapidly growing field of nonprofit activity. Our findings show a strong relationship between organizations' entrepreneurial behavior and levels of organizational capacity. We discuss our results relative to the importance of both organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior in a rapidly growing nonprofit subsector. The results contribute to the continued development and refinement of theoretical and empirical work on the causal links between organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior more generally.     

The unconstrained binary quadratic programming problem: a survey

In recent years the unconstrained binary quadratic program (UBQP) has grown in importance in the field of combinatorial optimization due to its application potential and its computational challenge. Research on UBQP has generated a wide range of solution techniques for this basic model that encompasses a rich collection of problem types. In this paper we survey the literature on this important model, providing an overview of the applications and solution methods.