Accessing Higher Education: The Influence of Cultural and Social Capital on University Choice

Over recent years, sociologists of education have paid increasing attention to the higher education sector. They have highlighted the ways in which, despite the significant expansion in the number of university places available in many countries across the world, access to and choices about higher education continue to be strongly influenced by social class. This article provides an overview of recent literature in this field and explores how scholars have tended to explain this influence by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural and social capital.     

Visual Access and Attention in Two‐Year‐Olds' Event Reasoning and Object Search

Several recent studies have revealed substantial limitations in 2‐year‐olds' ability to search accurately for objects that have undergone unseen movement, even along highly constrained paths. In many of these studies, children observed a ball as it rolled down a track and behind an occluding panel that contained 4 doors. The track had a barrier that was partly visible and could be placed in locations corresponding to the doors. When the ball came to a rest against the barrier and behind the occluder, the child's task was to find the ball by opening the correct door. The search accuracy of 2‐year‐olds has not differed from chance across several variations of this task. This research was conducted to identify the source of 2‐year‐olds' limitation in this domain. Children were granted a full view of the event before the ball was occluded with a door panel. Children's performance was better under this condition, but was still not systematically accurate unless their gaze remained locked onto the correct location. Two‐year‐olds' weak performance in these search tasks appears to be more a consequence of limitations in spatial integration than in their representation of unseen movement.     

Quantitative Risk Assessment for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in Low- or Zero-Prevalence Countries: The Example of Norway

A predictive case-cohort model is applied to Norwegian data to analyze the interaction between challenge and stability factors for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) during the period 1980-2010. For each year, the BSE risk in cattle is estimated as the expected number of cases. The age distribution of expected cases as well as the relative impact of different challenges is estimated. The model consists of a simple, transparent, and practical deterministic spreadsheet calculation model, in which the following country-specific inputs are entered: (i) annual imports of live cattle and meat and bone meal, (ii) age distribution of native cattle, and (iii) estimated annual basic reproduction ratio (R(0)) for BSE. Results for Norway indicate that the highest risk of BSE cases was in 1989, when a total BSE risk of 0.13 cases per year was expected. After that date, the year-to-year decrease in risk ranged between 3% and 47%, except for a secondary peak in 1994 at 0.06 cases per year. The primary peak was almost entirely (99%) attributable to the importation of 11 cattle from the United Kingdom between 1982 and 1986. The secondary peak, in 1994, originated mainly from the recycling of the U.K. imported cattle (92%). In 2006, the remaining risk was 0.0003 cases per year, or 0.001 per million cows per year, with a maximal age-specific incidence of 0.03 cases per million per year in 10-year-old cattle. Only 15% of the cases were expected in imported cattle. The probability of having zero cases in Norway in 2006 was estimated to be 99.97%. The model and results are compared to previous risk assessments of Norway by the EU.     

Inventing adulthoods: a biographical approach to understanding youth citizenship

Traditionally adulthood and citizenship have been synonymous. Yet adulthood is changing. In this paper we explore how young people's evolving understandings of adulthood may contribute towards an understanding of citizenship within the broader context of increasingly extended and fragmented transitions. The paper draws on a unique qualitative longitudinal data set in which 100 young people, from contrasting social backgrounds in the United Kingdom, have been followed over a five‐year period using repeat biographical interviews. We present first the themes that emerged from a cross‐cut analysis of the first of three rounds of interviews distinguishing between relational and individualised understandings of adulthood. We then present a model we developed to capture the ways that young people sought out opportunities for competence and recognition in different fields of their lives. Finally a case study that follows a young woman through her three interviews illustrates how these themes can appear in an individual trajectory. We offer the model and case study as a way of exploring a more subjective approach to citizenship in which participation is not deferred to some distant future in which economic independence is achieved, but is understood as constantly constructed in the present.     

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.     

Conceptions of Work Among Adolescents and Young Adults With Mental Retardation

Semistructured interviews were conducted with 16 Israeli adolescents and young adults with mild mental retardation to examine their perceptions of the world of work. A consensual qualitative strategy of analysis (C. E. Hill, B. J. Thompson, & E. N. Williams, 1997) yielded 4 domains (Definitions of Work, Reasons for Working, Self‐Awareness, Knowledge About the World of Work) and 12 categories. Although respondents showed strong willingness to participate in the world of work, they had little information regarding this realm. Implications are discussed for career development programs targeting young persons with mental retardation and community and family involvement in such programs.     

Interdisciplinary bar for the public interest: What CSR and NGO frameworks contribute to the public relations of British and European activists

This paper outlines the ways in which various literatures and exemplary organizations (Business for Social Responsibility, the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, and the Global Compact) define, set principles, and provide frameworks for corporate social responsibility (CSR). It also explores British broadcasters’ accountability mechanisms and the extent to which U.K. broadcasting activist NGOs view them as adequate CSR. The activists studied were six British broadcasting-centered and Scottish cultural NGOs that lobby in the EU and at home. The data suggested that these activists’ public relations has pro-social, pro-democratic effects and that the CSR/NGO literatures and organizational frameworks provided may enable broadcasting activists and targets to more effectively pursue CSR.     

CORPORATE DIVERSIFICATION REVISITED: The Political–Legal Environment,the Multilayer‐Subsidiary Form,and Mergers and Acquisitions

This article examines causes of product‐line diversification in the largest 200 U.S. corporations between 1986 and 1996. The analysis shows that some corporations decreased their level of diversification. However, in contrast with previous studies, other corporations became more diversified. Change in the number of first‐level subsidiaries and the value of mergers and acquisitions influenced corporate diversification. In contrast with the multidivisional form, the organizational characteristics of the multilayer‐subsidiary form give management greater capacity to socialize capital, pursue mergers and acquisitions, and manage a large and diversified corporation. This multilayer‐subsidiary form limits the managerial problem of bounded rationality by organizing product lines and product groups in legally independent subsidiary corporations that are embedded in their respective markets.     

Family Therapy Following the Death of a Child*

The reactions of the entire family system to the death of a child are examined. The case illustrates therapeutic interventions dealing with changes in family structure, guilt and mourning processes in parents, anxiety and other reactions of children, and the cognitive confusion of both children and adults. The problems for the therapist in working with a family following the death of a child are discussed.