The poverty of social control: explaining power in the historical sociology of the welfare state

The concept ‘social control’ has been criticised from a variety of quarters in recent years, particularly by historians and historical sociologists. However, it remains in common usage in sociological studies of welfare, deviance and social control. This paper shows, first, how this reliance on the concept of social control is rooted in a wider-ranging argument in social and political theory concerning the liberal-democratic fusion between the state and civil society, and that the lack of resolution of this argument is the foundation of the persistence of the concept social control in other areas of social inquiry, despite its repeated ‘falsification’. Second, the paper highlights the main arguments against the use of ‘social control’ in explaining social order, in particular the misunderstanding of class, culture and power which its use encourages, and the paper will conclude with a discussion of alternative ways of conceptualising the operation of power in contemporary societies.     

Job Insecurity and the Timing of Parenthood: A Comparison between Eastern and Western Germany

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the economic determinants of fertility behavior by addressing the role of job insecurity in couples’ intentions concerning parenthood and its timing. It starts from the hypothesis that cultural values moderate individuals’ reactions to job insecurity and the way it is related to family formation. With a systematic thematic content analysis of a set of semi-structured interviews with childless men and women around the age of 30 in eastern and western Germany, we are able to show that there are substantial differences in the consequences of job insecurity on intentions to have a first child. In western Germany, a relatively secure job career is expected to precede family formation, and this sequence of transitions is rather rigid, whereas in eastern Germany job security and family formation are thought of and practiced as parallel investments. We suggest that the lack of convergence in family formation patterns between eastern and western Germany after the unification of the country in 1990 is partially related to different attitudes toward job insecurity in the two contexts.     

STTEPping in the right direction? Western classical music in an orchestral programme for disadvantaged African youth

This article looks at STTEP, an outreach project currently housed at the University of Pretoria, which concentrates on the teaching of western orchestral instruments, plus background areas such as music theory, to disadvantaged children and youth from a variety of townships around Pretoria, South Africa. STTEP’s direction can well be described as ‘right’ – pupils are already surrounded by all kinds of global phenomena, and their formal music studies in western classical music are not making them forget their roots. In fact, the contrary has been found to be the case and some interesting cultural fusions are already seen – always a sign of a living culture.     

Supervisory powers relating to foundations: A comparative analysis of foundation law

This paper compares legal approaches to foundations in six economically well-developed democracies (USA, England and Wales, Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands). ‘Foundations’ refers to ‘non-governmental, non-membership, organisations, recognised as a legal category with a purpose in the general interest’. This covers the common field of the common law's charity and the civil law's foundation as a legal person. The countries organise public supervision of foundations in very different ways. Mostly there is governmental involvement or involvement of an independent body in the establishment and governmental supervision of foundations in action. In a few cases, the supervisory power—concerning the foundations' activities, not their establishment—is with judicial authorities. Access to information of foundations (registration) and possible requests for sanctions by interested parties are also rather different. Not all rules are in accordance with the freedom of organisation and some are less desirable. The conclusion is that a balance between the freedom of the foundation (board), the protection of the public order and the protection of the interests of others can be found in a system with systematic supervision at the establishment- and later practice—by governmental or independent authorities or in a system with good registration and incidental supervision by judicial authorities, also at the request of interested parties. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.     

Late fertility decline in the Netherlands: The influence of religious denomination,socioeconomic group and region

Both published results from the 1930, 1947, 1960 and 1971 censuses and unpublished ones are used to examine the influence that religious denomination, socio-economic group and region exerted on the fertility of marriages contracted between 1876 and 1959. A theory formulated by Lesthaeghe and Wilson on the relation between modes of production and secularization and the pace of fertility decline in Western Europe offers — in combination with van Heek's views on the special position of Dutch Roman Catholicism — a starting point for an explanation of why the fertility decline of Roman Catholics, self-employed and agricultural labourers lagged behind.     

Axiomatizations of the normalized Banzhaf value and the Shapley value

A cooperative game with transferable utilities– or simply a TU-game – describes a situation in which players can obtain certain payoffs by cooperation. A solution concept for these games is a function which assigns to every such a game a distribution of payoffs over the players in the game. Famous solution concepts for TU-games are the Shapley value and the Banzhaf value. Both solution concepts have been axiomatized in various ways. An important difference between these two solution concepts is the fact that the Shapley value always distributes the payoff that can be obtained by the `grand coalition' consisting of all players cooperating together while the Banzhaf value does not satisfy this property, i.e., the Banzhaf value is not efficient. In this paper we consider the normalized Banzhaf value which distributes the payoff that can be obtained by the `grand coalition' proportional to the Banzhaf values of the players. This value does not satisfy certain axioms underlying the Banzhaf value. In this paper we introduce some new axioms that characterize the normalized Banzhaf value. We also provide an axiomatization of the Shapley value using similar axioms. Received: 10 April 1996 / Accepted: 2 June 1997     

Correcting missing-data bias in historical demography

Studies on population history are often based on incomplete records of life histories. For instance, in studies using data obtained from family reconstitution, the date of death is right censored (by migration) and the censoring time is never observed. Several methods for the correction of mortality estimates are proposed in the literature, most of which first estimate the number of individuals at risk and then use standard techniques to estimate mortality. Other methods are based on statistical models. In this paper all methods are reviewed, and their merits are compared by applying them to simulated and to seventeenth-century data from the English parish of Reigate. An ad hoc method proposed by Ruggles performs reasonably well. Methods based on statistical models, provided they are sufficiently realistic, give comparable accuracy and allow the estimation of several other quantities of interest, such as the distribution of migration times.     

Precedence tests and Lehmann alternatives

G = F ^k (k > 1); G = 1 − (1−F) ^k (k < 1); G = F ^k (k < 1); and G = 1 − (1−F) ^k (k > 1), where F and G are two continuous cumulative distribution functions. If an optimal precedence test (one with the maximal power) is determined for one of these four classes, the optimal tests for the other classes of alternatives can be derived. Application of this is given using the results of Lin and Sukhatme (1992) who derived the best precedence test for testing the null hypothesis that the lifetimes of two types of items on test have the same distibution. The test has maximum power for fixed κ in the class of alternatives G = 1 − (1−F) ^k , with k < 1. Best precedence tests for the other three classes of Lehmann-type alternatives are derived using their results. Finally, a comparison of precedence tests with Wilcoxon's two-sample test is presented. Received: February 22, 1999; revised version: June 7, 2000     

The generalized two-sided power distribution

The generalized standard two-sided power (GTSP) distribution was mentioned only in passing by Kotz and van Dorp Beyond Beta, Other Continuous Families of Distributions with Bounded Support and Applications, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 2004. In this paper, we shall further investigate this three-parameter distribution by presenting some novel properties and use its more general form to contrast the chronology of developments of various authors on the two-parameter TSP distribution since its initial introduction. GTSP distributions allow for J-shaped forms of its pdf, whereas TSP distributions are limited to U-shaped and unimodal forms. Hence, GTSP distributions possess the same three distributional shapes as the classical beta distributions. A novel method and algorithm for the indirect elicitation of the two-power parameters of the GTSP distribution is developed. We present a Project Evaluation Review Technique example that utilizes this algorithm and demonstrates the benefit of separate powers for the two branches of activity GTSP distributions for project completion time uncertainty estimation.     

A comparison of test statistics for the recovery of rapid growth‐based enumeration tests

This paper considers five test statistics for comparing the recovery of a rapid growth‐based enumeration test with respect to the compendial microbiological method using a specific nonserial dilution experiment. The finite sample distributions of these test statistics are unknown, because they are functions of correlated count data. A simulation study is conducted to investigate the type I and type II error rates. For a balanced experimental design, the likelihood ratio test and the main effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) test for microbiological methods demonstrated nominal values for the type I error rate and provided the highest power compared with a test on weighted averages and two other ANOVA tests. The likelihood ratio test is preferred because it can also be used for unbalanced designs. It is demonstrated that an increase in power can only be achieved by an increase in the spiked number of organisms used in the experiment. The power is surprisingly not affected by the number of dilutions or the number of test samples. A real case study is provided to illustrate the theory. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.