Clarification? Yes! Standarization? No. Or: What Kind of Cooperation for the Sociology of Culture?

Christian Smith’s paper “The Incoherence of ‘Culture’ in American Sociology” is a valuable provocation that can prompt us to reflect on the role of concepts and on the role of agreement on the definition of concepts in scientific research. In this comment paper, I raise questions about Smith’s empirical expectation that sociologists should agree on a concept of culture based on debates in the sociology of science. I also suggest that in terms of the future agenda for the sociology of culture, we should distinguish between dialogue and clarification on the one hand, which I agree is needed, and standardization on the other hand, which seems incompatible with open-minded empirical research. Rather than work on agreement on what culture is, we might work on clarifying relevant distinctions among dimensions of culture.     

‘Western hegemony’ in the social sciences: fields and model systems

This paper discusses the role of privileged research objects (‘model systems’) in producing patterns in transnational knowledge production. In its approach it follows Bourdieu's call to focus on contexts of production and forces internal to disciplines as well as his insistence on practice. Learning from work in science and technology studies it also considers material objects of knowledge and spaces of knowledge-production. It discusses the case of sociology and argues that conventions surrounding privileged research objects matter relatively independently of authors’ national origin or field-position. Examining model systems, I argue, can contribute to our understanding of how some well-established inequalities are produced and reproduced. This focus adds specific stakes to the debates about global knowledge production: we can discuss the problem of neglected cases in ways that are not always included in current reflections that draw on general political – rather than specifically knowledge-political – categories.     

Tests on asymmetry for ordered categorical variables

Skewness is a well-established statistical concept for continuous and, to a lesser extent, for discrete quantitative statistical variables. However, for ordered categorical variables, limited literature concerning skewness exists, although this type of variables is common for behavioral, educational, and social sciences. Suitable measures of skewness for ordered categorical variables have to be invariant with respect to the group of strictly increasing, continuous transformations. Therefore, they have to depend on the corresponding maximal-invariants. Based on these maximal-invariants, we propose a new class of skewness functionals, show that members of this class preserve a suitable ordering of skewness and derive the asymptotic distribution of the corresponding skewness statistic. Finally, we show the good power behavior of the corresponding skewness tests and illustrate these tests by applying real data examples.     

Chile and beyond: The second-generation pension reforms in Latin America

In the early 1990s, pension reforms leading to substantial changes in the organization and financing of old age security were undertaken in Argentina, Colombia and Peru. Implemented ten years after the pioneer reforms in Chile, they have taken advantage of the experiences and lessons of the Chilean case; at the same time, the second-generation reforms clearly demonstrate the restrictions policy makers are being faced with in a democratic political context. This paper examines the recent pension reform experiences in Latin America and discusses their implications for a modified concept of old age security.     

Religion, social support, and health among the Japanese elderly

We address three issues in this paper: (1) Is religion related to self-rated health, (2) do these salubrious effects arise because religion encourages people to provide help to significant others, and (3) is the relationship between religion and helping others more evident among older men than elderly women? We analyze the relationships among religion, support giving, and health with data provided by a national probability sample of 2,153 older people in Japan who were interviewed face-to-face in 1996. Greater involvement in religion is associated with providing help to others more often, but these effects emerge for older men only. Regardless of gender, elders who provide assistance to others more often rate their health more favorably than older adults who are less involved in helping others. These results confirm that religion is related to health, and that helping others may explain at least part of the reason for this relationship.     

The Speed of Experience: The Co‐narrative Method in Experience Economy Education

This paper proposes a management learning technique called the co‐narrative method. This approach is seen as a useful means of capturing the subtler nuances of experience economy interactions, as well as learning ethics and corporate social responsibility, by nurturing empathy and compassion. A method is presented based on the example of the idea of slow as fast side of organizational and festival experiences, which is explored through autoethnographic studies of participation in experience economy events. It builds upon insights into improving management education through the use of the humanistic approach. The so‐called co‐narrative method is based on a syzygic mode uniting the two oppositions (while preserving their inherent contradictions). It encourages its users to exercise understanding of the experience of the Other, while teaching about concrete cases and events.     

The eIFL.net Initiative: Access and Management of Electronic Resources by Library Consortia in Developing and Transition Countries

Abstract

eIFL.net is an umbrella organization of library consortia in fifty transition and developing countries. Its main purpose is to negotiate, encourage, and advocate for the wide availability of scholarly electronic information by library users from the education and research sectors, professional communities, governmental organizations, and civil society.

The paper presents the beginnings, goals, and development of eIFL.net in its five years of existence. The authors outline what it has achieved so far and provide an overview of the main challenges that developing countries face in accessing quality e-resources. Some success stories will demonstrate concrete accomplishments of the organization and its participating countries.     

Regulation and supervision of pension funds: Principles and practices

This paper examines the current principles and practices of pension fund regulation and supervision around the world. First an overview of the main approaches in OECD and non-OECD countries and the most important issues and their relevance for different types of pension plans will be given. Then the paper will focus on a selection of issues which are the subject of intense debate at the moment, particularly in the Latin American context: the imposition of quantitative restrictions on pension fund investments, state guarantees for private pensions, and fee and cost controls.     

Speech Perception by 6‐to 8‐Month‐Olds in the Presence of Distracting Sounds

The role of selective attention in infant phonetic perception was examined using a distraction masker paradigm. We compared perception of /bu/ versus /gu/ in 6‐ to 8‐month‐olds using a visual fixation procedure. Infants were habituated to multiple natural productions of 1 syllable type and then presented 4 test trials (old‐new‐old‐new). Perception of the new syllable (indexed as novelty preference) was compared across 3 groups: habituated and tested on syllables in quiet (Group 1), habituated and tested on syllables mixed with a nonspeech signal (Group 2), and habituated with syllables mixed with a non‐speech signal and tested on syllables in quiet (Group 3). In Groups 2 and 3, each syllable was mixed with a segment spliced from a recording of bird and cricket songs. This nonspeech signal has no overlapping frequencies with the syllable; it is not expected to alter the sensory structure or perceptual coherence of the syllable. Perception was negatively affected by the presence of the auditory distracter during habituation; individual performance levels also varied more in these groups. The findings show that perceiving speech in the presence of irrelevant sounds poses a cognitive challenge for young infants. We conclude that selective attention is an important skill that supports speech perception in infants; the significance of this skill for language learning during infancy deserves investigation.     

Nuclear hormone receptors, metabolism, and aging: what goes around comes around. Transcription factors link lipid metabolism and aging-related processes

Previous studies have linked the mysterious and inevitable process of aging to essential processes such as metabolism, maturation, and fecundity. Each of these processes is controlled to a large extent by nuclear hormone receptors (NHRs). NHRs also play important roles in the control of periodical processes, the most recently implicated being circadian rhythm. This Review stresses the mounting evidence for tight relationships between each of these NHR-regulated processes and the processes of aging.