Student homicidal violence in schools: an international problem

School homicides have been become a worldwide phenomenon. In the decade following the Columbine shooting there have been at least forty similar events in other countries. This article addresses the international scope of this problem and some of the complex conceptual issues that make student homicidal violence difficult to define and study. Meaningful research on risk and protective factors that can inform evidence-based preventive models is summarized.     

Like mother, (not) like daughter: The social construction of menopause and aging

In recent American history, the definition of menopause has shifted from a natural, developmental transition to an increasingly more medicalized perspective that emphasizes biological deficits of the aging female body. Using qualitative data from two generations of women, this essay explores how and why this redefinition has occurred and what effect it has had on women's attitudes toward health and aging. The physical experiences of menopause were remarkably similar across mother-daughter pairs; however, daughters (who represented a slice of the baby boom cohort) differed from their mothers in how they talked about menopause, how they defined and treated menopause, and how willingly they accepted or fought the changes associated with menopause. Major social institutions, including the media and pharmaceutical industry, have played a significant role in reshaping the cultural lens through which women experience issues of health, body, and aging. This essay emphasizes the baby boomers' desire to maintain control over their bodies and considers how this cohort of women, as a result, may experience late-life issues of body and health.     

Starting Behind: A Comparative Analysis of the Academic Standing of Students Entering Charter Schools*

Objectives. The purpose of this study is to assess if students enter charter schools at an academic disadvantage compared to students who make other types of school‐choice decisions, such as transferring between district schools, from a charter to a district school, or staying in the same school. We assess the demographic and academic characteristics of students prior to choosing to attend a charter school in comparison to students who made other types of school‐choice decisions and broaden the operational definition of a “disadvantaged” student when exploring differences between charter and district students to include academic achievement prior to entering a school. Methods. The analysis is conducted with student‐level panel data and a progressive series of ANCOVA models that were estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. This methodology allows for a comparison of the mean differences in academic achievement among students who made different types of school‐choice decisions while controlling for student‐level covariates. Results. Students who transferred from district to charter schools had the lowest levels of prior academic achievement compared to students who made other types of choice decisions. Conclusions. When Arizona charter authorizers face the deluge of renewal decisions that are approaching, the quality of education available to the next generation of charter school students is at stake. Renewal decisions will impact what choices are available going forward and, given the comparative academic disadvantage of charter school students prior to entering, those decisions should take into consideration the starting point for students entering charter schools.     

Embeddedness of Organizational Capabilities*

Managers must regularly make decisions on how to access and deploy their limited resources in order to build organizational capabilities for a sustainable competitive advantage. However, failure to recognize that organizational capabilities involve complex and intricately woven underlying processes may lead to an incomplete understanding of how capabilities affect competitive advantage. As a means of understanding this underlying complexity, we discuss how managerial decisions on resource acquisition and deployment influence capability embeddedness and argue that capability embeddedness has an incremental effect on firm performance beyond the effects from organizational resources and capabilities. To investigate these issues, we present a hierarchical composed error structure framework that relies on cross‐sectional data (and allows for generalizations to panel data). We demonstrate the framework in the context of retailing, where we show that the embeddedness of organizational capabilities influences retailer performance above and beyond the tangible and intangible resources and capabilities that a retailer possesses. Our results illustrate that understanding how resources and capabilities influence performance at different hierarchical levels within a firm can aid managers to make better decisions on how they can embed certain capabilities within the structural and social relationships within the firm. Moreover, understanding whether the underlying objectives of the capabilities that are being built and cultivated have convergent or divergent goals is critical, as it can influence the extent to which the embedded capabilities enhance firm performance.     

PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL SUPPORT AVAILABILITY AND COPING BEHAVIORS AMONG GAY MEN WITH HIV

Analyzing face-to-face, semistructured interviews, we discuss how perceptions of social support availability are formed among gay men coping with HIV. Experiences of receiving support increased perceived availability for specific types of support from specific individuals, but receiving support also gave these men a general sense that someone would be available for assistance. Other aspects of social relationships, such as closeness and role expectations, contributed to gay men's perceptions of support availability. The results suggest that when people with common problems cope together, collective knowledge of support availability may emerge from observations of others' support exchanges as well as from discussions of support experiences. Individuals or groups of individuals may actively create and modify their perceptions of support availability when they cope with anticipated problems. Thus, the study provided an opportunity to integrate concepts of coping and social support into the collective action and social constructionist frameworks.     

追寻诗意的栖居——“马克思主义美学的现状与未来”国际学术研讨会综述

20 0 0年 7月 2 3日至 2 6日 ,由中华全国美学学会、中国中外文艺理论学会、桂林市对外人民友好协会、武汉大学美学研究所、广西师范大学中文系、广西师范大学马克思主义美学研究所、广西师范大学出版社等单位联合主办 ,广西师范大学中文系承办的“马克思主义美学的现状与未来”国际学术研讨会在广西桂林市举行。来自美国、澳大利亚、中国香港特别行政区以及中国大陆多所高校和研究部门共 58位专家学者出席了此次会议。会议讨论的主要问题是 :一、回顾马克思主义美学研究与阐释的发展历程 ;二、分析当代文化语境下 ,马克思主义美学的发展现…     

全球化何时帮助穷人？

全球化与贫穷之间有何联系?发展中经济体长期以来一直将国际贸易和金融作为发展的解决方案,但全球35%的人口仍生活在国际贫困线以下。经济学家和政治学家探究了这种联系,但仍未得出结论。我们回顾了相关文献,认为要理解全球化与贫穷之间的联系,我们必须根本理解针对最贫困人口政策背后的政治动机。具体来说,我们主张学者需要明确发展中国家政府的意识形态立场,这一认同超越了发达国家主流的传统左右翼分歧的观点。我们为学者在全球范围内如何开始推动意识形态起作用以及为什么必须评估全球化与贫穷的联系提供了理论指导。此外,我们还对我们的论点提供了初步的定量和定性检验。最后,两个学科的学者为了评估贸易与贫穷之间的联系,必须开始评估政府对扶贫再分配的承诺(而不是受制于既得精英利益集团的政策)。     

Families,meals and synchronicity: eating together in British dual earner families

Based on a sample of British dual earner families with young children drawn from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, the paper examines their food practices, in particular the conditions under which families are able to eat together or not during the working week. The concept of synchronicity is drawn upon to shed light on whether meals and meal times are coordinated in family life and the facilitators and constraints upon coordination. The paper suggests that whether families eat together is not only influenced by parents' work time schedules but also children's timetables relating to their age and bodily tempos, their childcare regimes, their extra-curricular activities and the problem of coordinating different food preferences and tastes.