Structuring institutional analysis for urban ecosystems: A key to sustainable urban forest management

A decline in urban forest structure and function in the United States jeopardizes the current focus on developing sustainable cities. A number of social dilemmas—for example, free-rider problems—restrict the sustainable production of ecosystem services and the stock of urban trees from which they flow. However, institutions, or the rules, norms, and strategies that affect human decision-making, resolve many such social dilemmas, and thus, institutional analysis is imperative for understanding urban forest management outcomes. Unfortunately, we find that the definition of institutions varies greatly across and within disciplines, and conceptual frameworks in urban forest management and urban ecosystems research often embed institutions as minor variables. Given the significance of institutional analysis to understanding sustainable rural resource management, this paper attempts to bring clarity to defining, conceptually framing, and operationally analyzing institutions in urban settings with a specific focus on sustainable urban forest management. We conclude that urban ecologists and urban forest management researchers could benefit from applying a working definition of institutions that uniquely defines rules, norms, and strategies, by recognizing the nested nature of operational, collective choice, and constitutional institutions, and by applying the Institutional Analysis and Development framework for analysis of urban social-ecological systems (SESs). Such work promises to spur the desired policy-based research agenda of urban forestry and urban ecology and provide cross-disciplinary fertilization of institutional analysis between rural SESs and urban ecosystems.     

BARING LIFE AND LIFESTYLE IN THE NON-PLACE

In this paper I offer an intervention into two prevailing approaches to the non-place – those spaces of transit that include hotels, airports, theme parks, and refugee camps. The non-place is treated on the one hand as an apolitical space of hypermediated consumption and mobility while, on the other hand, it also figures as exemplary of the biopolitical regulation of life within a ‘contemporary camp’. I argue that the non-place must be read, not as spectacle or camp, but as housing a very specific politics of place wherein the logic of the camp and the spectacle collide. What is of interest to me is not so much the camp as the hidden space of modernity, but how it finds a willing alibi in the spectacular media saturated spaces of capital. Within the non-place, the forces of global corporate capital have found an amiable space to both invest (lifestyle) and reduce (bare life) human life to maximize and optimize its own power.     

Tracing the Life of a Crime Category

This article traces the shifting meaning of “date rape” in US newspapers across a fourteen-year period. A crime category created by a niche feminist press, “date rape” originally referred to a form of intimate-partner violence, and has, more latterly, come to refer predominantly to an assault that occurs after a victim has had a drug, such as Rohypnol, surreptitiously slipped into her drink. Employing quantitative content analysis to explicate this shift, the article considers possible explanations for the changing meaning of “date rape,” including the applicability of the risk thesis and criminological theory on the de-politicisation of crime. Finally, I suggest that a feminist perspective allows us to recognise that “date rape” has been transformed from an issue of female disempowerment into a nebulous threat of limited ideological significance.     

Construction of some classes of balanced cross-over designs from terraces

5 and 6 have recently introduced power-sequence terraces. In this paper we have used these terraces for the construction of some new families of balanced cross-over designs of first and second order which are variance-balanced. We have also used them for the construction of some new families of balanced ternary cross-over designs.     

Does it or Doesn't it? Geographic Differences and the Costs of Living

Abstract The relative cost of living in rural areas has long been of interest to rural sociologists. Today, the popular perception is that rural prices are lower. This study examines geographic differences in the costs of living in Kentucky. The results indicate that, contrary to the popular perception, when prices of the same products and services were compared, there was no consistent pattern of lower prices in the rural counties. Furthermore, differences in the material conditions of rural living meant that there were additional costs that price comparisons alone did not capture.     

The Experience of Higher Education from the Perspective of Disabled Students

This article describes the findings and examines the issues arising from a small-scale investigation into the experience of higher education from the perspective of disabled students at a university in the United Kingdom, and makes recommendations for policy and practice. Methodology involved semi-structured interviews with participants to reveal individual experience and analysis of relevant documentation from the university to examine the rhetoric underlying their experience. Factors that create a positive experience for disabled students, and those which effect discriminatory practice and marginalisation are identified. The implications of the findings for policy and practice are discussed, and conclusions drawn including: the need for a central policy which supports the philosophy of an accessible learning environment for all students; central co-ordination to implement the policy with practical guidelines to departments; ongoing monitoring and evaluation procedures which involve disabled students; staff training and awareness; student advocacy.     

Contingencies of Self‐worth in Early Adolescence: The Antecedent Role of Perceived Parenting

Contingent self‐esteem (i.e., the degree to which one's self‐esteem is dependent on meeting particular conditions) has been shown to predict a wide range of psychosocial and academic problems. This study extends previous research on contingent self‐esteem by examining the predictive role of perceived parenting dimensions in a sample of early adolescents (N = 240; age range 11–15 years). Additionally, the effect of perceived parenting on contingent self‐esteem is compared with its effect on global self‐esteem. Our main findings showed that both responsiveness and psychological control were unique predictors of global self‐esteem whereas only psychological control uniquely predicted contingent self‐esteem. Although the effect of responsiveness on global self‐esteem was increased when combined with high levels of behavioral control, this effect did not depend on the level of psychological control. The effect of psychological control on contingent self‐esteem, however, generally increased when combined with high levels of responsiveness.