Economic Darwinism

We define an evolutionary process of “economic Darwinism” for playing the field, symmetric games. The process captures two forces. One is “economic selection”: if current behavior leads to payoff differences, behavior yielding lowest payoff has strictly positive probability of being replaced by an arbitrary behavior. The other is “mutation”: any behavior has at any point in time a strictly positive, very small probability of shifting to an arbitrary behavior. We show that behavior observed frequently is in accordance with “evolutionary equilibrium”, a static equilibrium concept suggested in the literature. Using this result, we demonstrate that generally under positive (negative) externalities, economic Darwinism implies even more under- (over-)activity than does Nash equilibrium.     

Being All Things to All Customers: Building Reputation in an Institutionalized Field

This paper seeks to draw empirical attention to the relationship between legitimacy and reputation in institutionalized fields. Norwegian hospitals find themselves in a strongly institutionalized field and do not want to differentiate from each other, despite seeking a favorable reputation. In order to acquire insights into the conditions that prompt organizations to reject differentiation, we carried out qualitative interviews with the hospitals’ communication directors. Three sets of justifications for not differentiating emerged from an inductive analysis of these interviews. Differentiation is not adapted to the universalistic needs of the hospitals, not in accordance with solidarity norms, and not a pragmatic solution. The analysis suggests that the hospitals face a trade‐off between the contradictory demands of similarity and difference and hence legitimacy and reputation: They renounce the advantage of a unique reputation (i.e. competitive advantage) in order to retain the benefits of conformity (i.e. legitimacy). Implications of these findings for our understanding of the relative salience of legitimacy and reputation and the dynamics between them are discussed.     

Self‐regulation in early childhood: The role of siblings,center care and socioeconomic status

Differences in children's self‐regulation are assumed to be explained by genetic factors, socialization experiences, and sociodemographic risk. As for socialization, little research has addressed the influence of having siblings or attending early center based child care on emerging self‐regulation. As regarding sociodemographic risk, few studies have been conducted in countries characterized by high equality and little poverty. In a longitudinal study following 1157 children, we investigated presence of siblings, center care exposure in the first 3 years of life (attendance, hours, and child group size), and family socioeconomic status (SES) as predictors of hot and cool effortful control (EC), at the child's age 48 months. The results showed that having a sibling was consistently related to better hot EC, whereas higher SES predicted better cool EC. A small effect implied that hours in center care at 36 months negatively predicted hot EC, whereas center care group size at 36 months modestly predicted better cool EC. Otherwise, center care variables were unrelated to self‐regulation.     

Kunuk took it to the streets of Greenland: single-issue protests in a young online democracy

Single-issue protests and online mobilization have proliferated in the wake of social media. While significant ground has been covered regarding the changing possibilities for mobilization, the question of how specific circumstances condition the political impact of online mobilization and public protests has received much less attention. During the last couple of years, Greenlanders have increasingly employed Facebook to mobilize the populace and arrange public demonstrations with noteworthy results. Arguing that single-issue protests cannot be separated from the issues they are concerned with, the paper explores how a single and potential trivial political issue – a new parliament building – developed from a prestige project supported by a nearly unanimous Parliament into a public-contested issue and a failed political project. The paper invokes Actor-Network Theory to account for the trajectory of the issue and how it was translated along the way as actors built and broke alliances. The concepts of mobilizing structures, opportunity structures and framing processes are employed to shed light on the conditions of possibilities for the emergence, development and impact of the protest against the parliament building. Finally, the paper discusses social media’s impact on the image of politically engaged Inuit and on the power relations between citizens and parliament in Greenland. This discussion is of paramount importance as Greenlanders are struggling with their colonial heritage while they are constructing Greenlandic democracy.     

Designing the Entrepreneurial University: The Interpretation of a Global Idea

Becoming an entrepreneurial university has been identified as the solution to the problems facing contemporary higher education systems. The idea of becoming an entrepreneurial university can be seen as the result of a more globalised higher education sector where the domestic and institution-specific characteristics of universities are downplayed in favour of a more uniform idea of what a university should do and how it should be organized. This article contributes to this scholarly discussion by analysing how efforts to transform universities into “more complete organisations” are understood and interpreted in terms of organisational structures.     

Quality of life in South Africa – The First Ten Years of Democracy

South Africa celebrated ten years of democracy in 2004. This special issue of Social Indicators Research (SIR) reviews developments that have impacted on the quality of life of ordinary South Africans during the transition period. The issue updates an earlier volume of SIR (Volume 41) published in 1997 and as a stand-alone volume. The earlier volume was initiated following SIR editor Alex Michalos’ first visit to South Africa. This update on quality of life in South Africa follows on his return visit to the country in 2004 to see firsthand the changes that had occured in the meantime. This introductory article outlines major achievements of and setbacks for the new democracy and the challenges facing it in future. It provides the backround for the evaluations of a range of quality of life domains and issues including poverty and inequality, crime, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, migration and housing, religiosity, reconciliation, and optimism for the future which are covered in the eleven articles that follow. The introduction divides the articles under the headings of challenges, achievements, monitoring quality of life, and social capital for the future. The overview article concludes that improvements in quality of life have been uneven but goodwill and a positive outlook bode well for South African quality of life in future.     

Experiments in modelling recent Danish fertility curves

This paper reports the outcome of an exercise in curve fitting to annual sets of Danish age-specific fertility rates for the years 1962 to 1971 by means of least squares. Functions fitted were a cubic spline, the Hadwiger and Coale-Trussell functions, the gamma and beta densities, two versions of a polynomial, and two of Brass's relational procedures, as well as the Gompertz curve. The spline function fitted all curves far better than any of the others. The Coale-Trussell procedure and gamma density were about equal, followed by the Hadwiger function. All of these functions fit the data well. One of the polynomials fit reasonably well, but the rest of the functions were less accurate.     

Elderly women show neither a shortage of strategies nor an overreliance on drugs in handling aging and in dealing with minor health problems

Women 65 years old and over make up the fastest growing population segment in North America. They are, particularly among the underprivileged, known to be heavy consumers of prescribed and over-the-counter drugs. The objective of this study was to identify the role of medication in underprivileged elderly women's strategies for aging well and dealing with minor health problems. A qualitative study was conducted among 40 women aged 65 to 75. Results show that elderly women seldom mention resorting to medication to "age well" although they report using this strategy to deal with minor health problems. Overall, the elderly women mentioned a wide range of strategies to cope with aging and minor health problems, which suggests that they are well equipped to face the challenges of aging.     

Victim of and witness to violence: an interactional perspective on mothers' perceptions of children exposed to intimate partner violence

This article reports a study of how mothers perceive the effects of intimate partner violence (IPV) during pregnancy and children's exposure to IPV: (a) Do interactional aspects of IPV have a negative impact on the fetus during pregnancy or on the newborn baby? and (b) Is there a relationship between interactional aspects of IPV and (a) children's risk of being exposed to IPV and (b) the age of the child when at risk for exposure to IPV? A representative sample of 137 IPV help-seeking mothers in Norway was interviewed. Severity of physical IPV and injury from sexual IPV increased the risk of consequences to the fetus. Frequency of physical and psychological IPV increased the likelihood of children's exposure. Duration of the partnership increased the risk of children's exposure to physical and sexual IPV. Finally, there was a negative linear association between children's age when exposed for the first time and frequency of physical and psychological IPV.