Hot Jobs in Cool Places. The Material Cultures of New Media Product Spaces: The Case of South of the Market, San Francisco

This paper explores the localization of new media production in San Francisco. It is contextualized within a debate about the material culture of cyberspace. Much rhetoric has been expended in 'reading off' idealized 'online' worlds into probable 'off-line' worlds: the 'death of geography' is a case in point. The case is made for a corrective to both the idealist-culturalist, and the materialist techno-economic, accounts of cyberspace that accords an opportunity for both to infuse one another. The paper uses the concept of the material cultural practice of making products, underpinned by the notion of product space, to argue in favour of a co-construction of the 'off-' and 'online' worlds. The case study illustrates the point of how the most ecstatic 'online' community is rooted in a particular space and place, and how 'off-line' practices are essential to its 'online' presence.     

Building an ideological fortress: the role of spirituality,encapsulation and sensemaking 1

An ethnography explores the role of religious values and beliefs in building an “ideological fortress”: a worldview that is seemingly impervious to attack. Specifically, this study develops the metaphor of an ideological fortress and how spirituality serves as “bricks”, “wall”, and “mortar” in that fortress. Used in these ways, religious values and beliefs facilitate member sensemaking by helping to socially encapsulate members, and by patching up inconsistencies within the ideology (i.e., “ideological holes”). Implications for the role of spirituality in organizational sensemaking and control are discussed.     

Social Activists: Lessons for Community Psychology

In a graduate class in community psychology, each student studied the lives and achievements of social activists. This article integrates the work and accomplishments of 5 social activists into a conceptual and methodological framework for social change within community psychology. These activists worked on issues including national liberation, women's suffrage, the rights of migrant workers, and community development. The methods used by these activists are particularly relevant to the field of community psychology. The article discusses the implications of the work and accomplishments of these social change agents.     

A discussion of the question: for what use are tests of hypotheses and tests of significance

The author believes that tests provide a poor model of most real problems, usually so poor that their objectivity is tangential and often too poor to be useful.     

Fair (and not so fair) division

Drawbacks of existing procedures are illustrated and a method of efficient fair division is proposed that avoids them. Given additive participants’ utilities, each item is priced at the geometric mean (or some other function) of its two highest valuations. The utilities are scaled so that the market clears with the participants’ purchases proportional to their entitlements. The method is generalized to arbitrary bargaining sets and existence is proved. For two or three participants, the expected utilities are unique. For more, under additivity, the geometric mean separates the prices where uniqueness holds and where it fails; it holds for the geometric mean except in one case where refinement is needed.      

A Longitudinal Analysis of Personal Values Socialization: Correlates of a Moral Self- Ideal in Late Adolescence

There has been considerable study of the development of moral reasoning in adolescence within the cognitive–developmental paradigm, but less empirical attention to the development of moral valuing and motivation. In a two‐year longitudinal study, we examined the correlates of high‐school students’ endorsement of explicitly moral values as ideals for the self. Those who reported being involved in community helping activities at age 17 were subsequently more likely to increase their relative emphasis on the importance of prosocial moral values for themselves. As predicted, an authoritative family parenting style was associated with more parent–adolescent value agreement in general (regarding both moral and non‐moral values). Particularly for males, reports of greater parent monitoring and strictness were associated with more emphasis on moral values for the self. This relation between parental strictness and males’ self‐ideals was mediated over time by perceived stronger emphases on moral values by both parents and friends. These findings suggest the potential utility of studying moral motivation to help understand prosocial development in adolescence.     

Delayed compensation for lost income

Lengthy legal proceedings are often required before an individual who has unjustly lost income is compensated. The utility loss while waiting in straitened circumstances exceeds the utility gain from later compensation if compensation is merely monies lost plus interest. The excess loss will be larger the more averse the individual is to intertemporal variation in consumption, the less complete and perfect the markets for borrowing and trading contingent claims, and the less the certainty about whether an award will be made. To make an injured individual whole, the focus should be on compensating not for loss of discounted income, but for loss of utility.     

Embodying “tech”: Articulatory setting,phonetic variation,and social meaning

This article examines the co‐occurring realization of two sociophonetic variables within a style—the LOT vowel in English and word‐initial /l/—to explore the link between articulatory setting and stylistic practice. At an arts‐focused high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, the curricular and social practices of students in the technical theatre department centre around manual labour. Ethnographic analysis demonstrates that “tech” constitutes a locally enregistered persona, informed by tech students’ positioning as working‐class subjects through their bodily, sartorial, and technological practices. Tech students also produce higher and more rounded variants of LOT, and more velarized productions of /l/, than their non‐tech peers, and I suggest that articulatory setting is at play in the cohesive indexicality of these variants. I advocate for the continued exploration of co‐occurring sociolinguistic variables which treat the body as a broader stylistic context, and propose that studies of co‐occurring features focus on the ideological processes by which combinations of variables come to index thematic styles.