Gender differences in the initiation and attribution of tactile intimacy

Cultural norms may restrict the demonstration of intimacy between men, such that male adults are relatively unlikely (in comparison to females) to display affection in public by hugging or putting hands around one another's waists. Study 1 examined via a role playing technique how the gender composition of a dyad and types of friendship influence tactile greetings. Males displayed less physical intimacy with male friends than with female (platonic or dating) friends and less than females displayed with their same-sex friends. Study 2 examined subjects' perceptions of and attributions about reciprocal touch. Male-male behavior was rated as less normal as a function of the level of physical touch (going from no touch, hugging, to arms around the waist). The normalcy rating of opposite-sex pairs did not vary as a function of the touch manipulation, but female, same-sex pairs' behavior was rated as less normal in the arms around the waist than in either the no touch or hug conditions. In the male same-sex pairs, hugging was seen as more likely to reflect a sexual relationship than no touch, while arms around one another's waist was rated as even more likely to represent a sexual relationship. It was suggested that homophobia, the fear of appearing or being homosexual, may operate to inhibit physical intimacy between men.     

Fair Processes for Societal Decisions Involving Distributional Inequalities

We investigate fair processes for societal decisions that involve different risks and benefits to different groups. A fair decision-making process is particularly important for decisions such as siting hazardous facilities. We experimentally evaluate the impact of alternative decision processes on the final choice of hypothetical facility sites and the resulting benefit and risk distribution to groups. The experimental task required choice among many alternative sites for a hazardous facility. Sites differ by the distribution of risks and benefits to each of two communities, and in the attractiveness of the sites to each community. Subjects were divided into three groups: individuals who judged the best site in the role of arbitrators, pairs of negotiators with one person representing each of the two communities, and trios who identified the best site in the role of a siting jury. We found the choices of negotiating and siting jury groups tended to emphasize the communities'preferences compared to the individual arbitrators who tended to focus on balancing the distribution of risks and benefits. Also, undergraduate psychology students, regardless of the dispute resolution mechanism, tended to display more emphasis on the risks and benefits, and graduate business students tended to focus more on the communities'preferences.     

Retaining State Hegemony in Canada in the 1990s: Government Response to an Agricultural Disaster*

De nos jours, les analyses des mouvements sociaux au Canada portent surtout sur les moyens employés à l'intérieur des mouvements pour remettre en cause les pratiques hégémoniques de l'État dans le but de modifier les rapports de force. Par conséquent, on n'a pas accordé beaucoup d'attention aux moyens mis en ?euvre par l'État pour contenir ces mouvements et les canaliser dans des directions qui déterminent en grande partie les orientations qu'ils adoptent et, en dernière instance, leur réussite ou leur disparition. Dans cette communication, l'auteure examine un type d'intervention préventive de l'État à l'égard de groupes qui pourraient devenir de veritables mouvements sociaux, intervention qui consiste à les intégrer en en faisant à toutes fins utiles de simples groupes d'inte-rêts. Elle illustre son propos en présentant un cas dans l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard, où l'État a réussi à empêcher un mouvement social potentiel de prendre forme. Current analyses of social movements in Canada focus primarily on the internal methods by which state hegemonic practices are challenged in an attempt to transform the relations of power. As a result, little attention is given to the methods by which the state increasingly constrains and channels social movements into particular directions that are crucial to the direction and ultimate success, or demise, of social movements. This paper looks at one way in which the state now intervenes to pre-empt antagonistic groups that have the potential to become full social movements, by co-opting them into little more than interest groups. Specifically, this paper attempts to show how the state successfully prevented a potential social movement on Prince Edward Island from reaching fruition.     

Accounting for Strategic Positioning: Responding to the Crisis in Management Accounting1

Recent diagnoses of a debilitating crisis within management accounting have quickly given way to the development and dissemination of many new techniques intended to restore the lost relevance of the discipline. Some of these techniques promise to have significant consequences for the future nature not only of management accounting but accounting in general. This paper identifies three generic approaches to relevant management accounting which are collectively termed accounting for strategic positioning, discusses the range of techniques which presently exist within these approaches and considers some of the difficulties involved in ensuring their widespread adoption. The paper concludes with some brief thoughts on how best to realize the full potential of accounting for strategic positioning.     

'Du hast jar keene Ahnung': African American English dubbed into German

This paper explores the translation of sociolinguistic variation by examining the ways that African American English (AAE) is dubbed into German. In discussing this ubiquitous yet poorly studied area of language use, I show that ideas about language as an index to social groupings are transferable to the degree that the ideas overlap in the cultures in question. In the case of German, if the character being dubbed is young, male and tied to the street cultures of the urban inner city, then AAE is dubbed using a form of German that has links to the urban youth cultures of north‐central Germany. The transferability of sociolinguistic variation is important to issues related to cross‐cultural communication and the ideologies that may play a role in the outcomes of that communication as well as to linguistic creativity and language style more generally.     

A NEW FAMILY OF NON-NEGATIVE DISTRIBUTIONS

We introduce a new, flexible family of distributions for non‐negative data, defined by means of a quantile function. We describe some properties of this family, and discuss several methods for estimating the parameters. The distribution is applied to an example from environmental engineering.     

The Contagiousness of Conflict: E.E. Schattschneider as a theorist of the information society

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892-1971) was one of the most distinguished US political scientists of his day but beyond an isolated footnote, his work rarely receives much attention today. This paper suggests that there is much in Schattschneider's work that deserves renewed attention. In 1960, Schattschneider published The Semisovereign People , a study of the transformation of US politics from a set of regional hegemonies to a genuinely national political system. While this may seem arcane to students of the information society, The Semisovereign People actually offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding the way in which new information and communications technologies are changing the global political landscape. In an era of satellite television, the Internet and the mobile phone, Schattschneider's key concepts of scope, visibility and the socialization of conflict provide powerful insights into the politics of a globalizing world. E.E. Schattschneider thought he was writing a book about the nationalization of US politics in the middle of the twentieth century in fact what he actually wrote was a theory of political globalization.     

A Non-Gaussian Spatial Process Model for Opacity of Flocculated Paper

ABSTRACT.  Product quality in the paper-making industry can be assessed by opacity of a linear trace through continuous production sheets, summarized in spectral form. We adopt a class of non-Gaussian stochastic models for continuous spatial variation to describe data of this type. The model has flexible covariance structure, physically interpretable parameters and allows several scales of variation for the underlying process. We derive the spectral properties of the model, and develop methods of parameter estimation based on maximum likelihood in the frequency domain. The methods are illustrated using sample data from a UK mill.     

Modelling conditional distributions in bivariate survival

Conditional distributions for bivariate survival can be obtained via a model for the joint distribution, or, as has sometimes been suggested, by modelling the conditioned variable directly, with the conditioning variable included as a covariate. A quantitative comparison of estimated covariate effects and predictive distributions under the two approaches is given. The results are illustrated in a novel frailty application.