Conference report: Sixth annual meeting of the international visual sociology association visual studies workshop,July 15, 16, 17, 1988

How does the visual construction process of news influence the resulting cultural images? In this study of Time magazine's creation of a 1990 documentary, “The Palestinians, A Long, Bloody Road to Nationhood,” I first look at possible meanings in the printed photographs, and then explore how Time's institutional processes of story conceptualization, photo assignment, editing, and layout each create parameters for meaning. The discussion shows how Time editors ultimately construct their product using visual affect as an assumed first level of meaning.     

Quantifying biodiversity

Darwin's Theory of Evolution explains the astonishing variety of life on earth. But many species are vanishing. We pass resolutions to slow the decline in biodiversity but we cannot tell whether those resolutions are met because we have no effective way of measuring biodiversity. Steve Buckland believes there are solutions.     

Cooperation and Knowledge Transfer within Buyer–Supplier Relationships: The Moderating Properties of Trust,Relationship Duration and Supplier Performance*

This paper examines the effect of relational factors on knowledge transfer within strategic buyer–supplier exchange. Prior research examining inter‐firm knowledge transfer has focused almost exclusively on horizontal forms of governance such as strategic alliances and joint ventures, whilst research on vertical forms, such as buyer–supplier relationships, is limited. We test the effect of four important relational properties: cooperation, trust, relationship duration and supplier performance. Quantitative data, gathered from 104 UK manufacturing firms in eight industry sectors, are used to analyse the hypothesized relationships through a moderated hierarchical regression model. Our study provides support for the importance of considering relational factors in the transfer of knowledge at the inter‐organizational level. In particular, the results indicate that knowledge transfer is positively influenced by the extent of cooperation, but that this relationship is moderated by the level of trust and the performance of the supplier firm. Managerial implications for these findings and future directions for research are then offered.     

Governing Sleepiness: Somnolent Bodies, Discourse, and Liquid Modernity

This paper is an inquiry into how a new truth about sleepiness is being produced in a society increasingly organized around the primacy of expertise and its representation in print and visual media. Sleepiness originally described a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep. Increasingly, however, a new and disturbing meaning of somnolence is found in a juncture of medical and epidemiological research, social movements, and popular culture. Alongside the idea that sleepiness is a tranquil promise of repose is another, emerging truth. Sleepiness, we are told, is hazardous to self and others, and, importantly, it is each person's responsibility to resist this seductive call of the body. How, we ask, is a private, routinely occurring state of partial consciousness deprivatized, linked to public health vernaculars, and transformed into a reprobate condition? This alternative, disturbing truth about sleepiness is shown to be emerging from several disparate, seemingly unrelated caches of scientific studies, social movement literatures, magazines and newspapers, and web sites. The ideas of Michel Foucault, who pioneered the contemporary study of discourse, are shown to be particularly apropos to this inquiry, though not without some modification to make them more amenable to a contemporary society shaped increasingly by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”     

Measurement of negative affectivity: A comparison of self-reports and observer ratings

Both self-report and non-self-report measures (co-worker ratings) of negative affectivity (NA) were obtained. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that these two measures of NA would be moderately correlated. It was also expected that self-report measure of NA would be more strongly correlated with self-reported stressors and strains than would the co-worker measure. Finally, it was predicted that statistically controlling for self-reported NA would attenuate stressor-strain correlations more than would controlling for co-worker ratings of NA. A sample of 121 full-time employees who were pursuing graduate degrees completed self-report measures of stressors, strains, and negative affectivity. These individuals also asked two co-workers to assess their level of negative affectivity. Results supported all three hypotheses. Specifically, there was modest convergence between self-reported and co-worker NA. In addition, self-reported NA was more strongly correlated with self-reported stressors and strains than was the co-worker NA measure. Finally, statistically controlling for self-reported NA attenuated stressor-strain correlations much more than controlling for co-worker NA. These results suggest that observer ratings may be of some use in future NA research. Other implications of these findings are discussed.     

Buying Insurance for Disaster-Type Risks: Experimental Evidence

This paper presents a series of experiments that confront subjects with low probability, high loss situations. A rich parameter set is examined and we find subjects respond to low probability, high loss risks in predictable ways. As loss events become more likely, or loss amounts get larger, or the cost of insurance falls, subjects are more likely to buy indemnifying insurance, even for the class of low probability risks that usually presents problems for standard expected utility theory. A novel application of Cameron's method to estimate willingness to pay from dichotomous choice responses allows us to estimate willingness to pay for insurance. We do not observe the bimodal distribution of bids found in other studies of similar risk situations.     

Empirical Research into White Racialized Identities in Britain

The intellectual project of using whiteness as an explicit tool of analysis is not one that has taken root in Britain. However, there are a number of empirical studies that investigate the racialization of white identities. In this article, I look at some empirical sociological fieldwork carried out on white identities in Britain since the early 1990s and identify the key themes arising. These themes are (in)visibility, norms and values, cultural capital and integration, contingent hierarchies and Empire in the present. In Britain, a pertinent distinction is between rural and urban settings for the enactment of white identities vis-à-vis those of minorities, and there is an exploration of some of the contingency that draws the boundary between 'white' and 'Other' in different places. Areas of commonality and distinctiveness are noted in terms of the American work. In the last section, I argue that there are a number of issues to resolve around continuing such studies, including linking the micro-level to the macro-level analysis, and expanding to international comparative work.     

Status and Cultural Defense: The Case of the New Christian Right

Abstract

Miller (1985) has claimed that a properly designed research project shows no support for the cultural defense or “politics of lifestyles concern” explanation for the rise of the New Christian Right. This short article argues that Miller's data have little or no bearing on the issues he claims to explore.