Local development agencies: Supporting voluntary action

This article examines the role of local development agencies (such as Rural Community Councils and Volunteer Bureaux) in developing and supporting local voluntary action. It finds these agencies equipped with the potential to make a significant contribution to their communities, in particular by taking on a strategic role as catalysts for service development. The article ends with a series of recommendations both for the management of these agencies and for the roles of central and local government in supporting them. Taken together, these recommendations specify the preconditions for the successful realization of this potential of local development agencies.     

The centrality of scientists and the translation of interests in the U.S. acid rain controversy

Les études societies traitant les controverses et problèmes de l'environnement concentrent davantage leur attention sur les activités d'entrepreneur des hommes de science. Cet exposé sur le problème de la pluie acide aux États-Unis analyse des activités ‘réclamatrices’ et de ‘traduction’ des premiers chercheurs-universitaires concernant la pluie acide. Il explique aussi comment ceci permit aux hommes de science et chercheurs scientifiques de se situer au coeur de la controverse. L'article se concentre sur plusieurs points de la controverse concernant les pluies acides aux États-Unis: la compréhension au cours des années 70 que les pluies acides étaient un problème scientifique et aussi un problème d'environnement, la création du National Atmospheric Deposition Program et le National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, et la construction des limites entre la science de la pluie acide et la vie politique. La position centrale de la recherche scientifique dans la controverse américaine sur les pluies acides sera ensuite comparée avec le rôle de la science dans le contexte canadien. Bien que la recherche scientifique soit placée au coeur dans les deux contextes, la politique en matière de la recherche scientifique concernant les pluies acides a étéélaborée par des institutions différentes, et pour des buts et des intérêts tout aussi différents. Social studies of environmental problems and controversies are focusing more attention on the entrepreneurial activities of scientists. This case study of the U.S. acid rain problem analyses the ‘claimsmaking’ and ‘translation’ activities of early, university-affiliated, acid rain scientists and how they enabled scientists and scientific research to be situated in a central position in the controversy. The paper focuses on several areas of the U.S. acid rain controversy: the construction of acid rain as a scientific and environmental problem in the 1970s, the formation of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program and the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, and the construction of boundaries between acid rain science and politics. The centrality of science in the U.S. acid rain controversy is then compared with the role of science in the Canadian context. Even though science was centrally placed in each context, acid rain science policies were shaped by different institutional actors and for different goals and interests.     

Majority Rules? The Effects of School Ethnic Composition on Substance Use by Mexican Heritage Adolescents

This article examines key aspects of the school environment - its composition by ethnicity and acculturation - as important social contexts for understanding Mexican immigrant and Mexican American adolescents' drug use norms and behaviors. Results are presented based on surveys completed by Mexican-background students from 35 Phoenix. Arizona middle schools, whose enrollment ranged from a numerical minority to an overwhelming majority. Multivariate mixed models tested for the influence of school ethnic composition measures on substance use outcomes, while accounting for individual level predictors and for the nesting of data at the school level. The proportional representation of Latinos in the school was not a factor in an individual's drug use norms or drug use for the sample overall. Once students were broken down by acculturation status, however, ethnic composition had an effect. Less acculturated Mexican heritage students in schools with higher proportions of Latino students reported less substance use and less adherence to pro-drug norms. Further investigation using other measures of ethnic composition suggested that these effects were attributable to the larger presence of less acculturated Latinos in the school rather than more acculturated Latino students. These school-level effects support the individual-level results indicating that less acculturated Mexican American students face less daunting substance use risks. The results suggest that ethnic group size, but not necessarily numerical predominance, matters and that within-group differences influence the effect of a particular ethnic group's presence in the school. In other words, the majority does not always rule. These findings are interpreted using the concepts of segmented assimilation and school level social capital.     

The representation of women in top ranked sociology departments

This paper compares the status of women in highly ranked sociology departments with their status in departments nationwide. The top ranked departments influence the profession markedly through their disproportionate share of the nation’s graduate students and faculty, and their production of more than half of the faculty in graduate departments. Women on top ranked faculties are more often at advanced ranks with tenure than their national peers, but there are proportionally fewer of them than in departments across the nation. Gender gaps in rank and tenure are also narrower in top ranked departments. Although women graduate students are less common in top ranked than in national departments, the former have financial assistance more often. Recent hiring practices have merely maintained women’s current level of representation, but men are disproportionately vacating faculty positions. With most departments growing slowly, if at all, this will result in a small increase over time in women’s fraction of faculty positions. where he is developing, with colleagues, a longitudinal model of the institutional factors that promote and impede progress in affirmative action in academia, and is completing a study of “double jeopardy” for minority women sociologists. This study was funded, in part, by the American Sociological Association, the Pacific Sociological Association, the University of Oregon Center for Women in Society, and an Arizona State University support grant. However, these organizations are not responsible for the views expressed in the paper.     

Economic,Social, and Cultural Contexts for Market and Product Diversification of the Lithuanian Tourism Sector

Lithuania has shown a 7% or greater increase in gross domestic product since joining the European Union, an increasing employment rate, and in part because of the greater incorporation of older people, especially females, a numerical increase in the employed; yet its population is declining because of both a low birth rate and migration. Both domestic and inbound tourism are rising. Yet because of the greater population in the Vilnius–Kaunas corridor, and because many people have left other counties to work there, tourist income in less developed parts of the country would help correct income disparities and foster sustainable regional development. While tourism attracts limited foreign direct investment, tourist infrastructure (boutique hotels, upgraded houses in the countryside, local restaurants, culture and language tourism) would be a good investment for smaller investors if strategically placed alongside a designated publicity campaign, in tandem with other eastern Baltic states or sponsored by EC delegations outside the EU, to attract small investors (including Lithuanians resident abroad) to the less developed regions of the country.      

Averting the Gaze: Gender and Power on the Perfumed Picket Line

This paper argues that the interplay of masculinity as a social construction, masculinism as an ideology, and patriarchy as a political system is grounded in the ontological condition of anxiety as a response to undecidability. Gender differences initiate the desire to resolve the ambiguities and incompletenesses experienced through the lack of the Other. In phallogo-centrism this means the masculinist claim to dominate and legislate epistemologically — to determine meaning for others and resolve, deny, or banish ambiguity. This resolution is, of course artificial and embodies within it fear and anxiety because of its own contingency. This condition then emerges in particular situations and events where the resolution of ambiguity is problematic. The paper takes the managerial problems experienced during the strike by Cathay Pacific Airways flight attendants as one such example. Tensions between emotional display and rational argumentation in the strike turned the status quo on its head. Management mounted an emotional defence of its position in language which evoked rationality but which was not itself a rational argument, revealing its origins in anxiety and the true fragility of its position. Flight attendants turned the seductive skills which company training had developed into an effective weapon to mobilize public opinion. Management were faced, not by the look or averted gaze of the normally supine stewardesses, but the committed, articulate, organized and consolidated stare of rebellious employees who had re-eroticized the workplace as a power play.